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The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought Edited by Gareth Stedman Jones, Gregory Claeys Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562 Online ISBN: 9780511973581 Hardback ISBN: 9780521430562 Paperback ISBN: 9781107676329

Chapter 7 - Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism pp. 200-254 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge University Press 7 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism From the principles of ’89 to the origins of modern terrorism gregory claeys and christine lattek

1 Introduction Modernity has been quintessentially defined by the revolutionary impulse, and our judgement, whether laudatory or critical, of the French Revolution of 1789. In the nineteenth century it would be associated with virtually all radical, republican and revolutionary movements, and, by the end of the First World War, the overthrow of many of the leading crowns of Europe. Yet the course of events which produced the overthrow of Louis XVI was not at its outset inevitably anti-monarchical, and would indeed culminate in imperial dictatorship. In association with American independence, how- ever, the idea of revolution came to be identified with the principle of popular sovereignty as such. It was also linked to the explosion of nation- alist aspirations which became definitive of the period, as well as to the causes of reaction and the creation of modern conservatism in the works of Burke, Bonald and others.1 If the British model of limited, constitu- tional monarchy resting on the principle of the rule of law was central to eighteenth-century reformers elsewhere, thus, it was increasingly sup- planted during the nineteenth century by the ideals which emerged from the revolutions of 1776, 1789 and 1848. ‘Revolution’ itself, which had once meant a restoration or rotational return to previous conditions, came to mean the violent overthrow of established regimes in the name of popular sovereignty, ethnic and national self-assertion, or both; and the conscious framing according to the principles of reason of an edifice hitherto regarded

1 The literature on the legacy of the Revolution is considerable. A starting point is Baker 1987 and Hayward 1991. We would like to thank Pamela Pilbeam in particular for comments on this essay, and the Minnesota State Historical Society, St. Paul, for supplying one reference. 200

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism largely as a natural, organically derived and divinely inspired order.2 To i t s opponents it was also often linked to an obsessive demand for individual autonomy, the growth of commercial and societal individualism, and the wish to break from traditional forms of authority, particularly paternalism and religion. In the first half of the century the revolutionary ideal was invoked by liberals against autocrats; in the second half, increasingly, it was by socialists, anarchists and other democrats against both autocracy, monarchy in prin- ciple, aristocratic oligarchy, and eventually, as consideration of the ‘social question’ gained ascendancy, liberalism in principle. Made initially largely in the name of liberty – the principle which continued to define its develop- ment in the United States – it came elsewhere to give increasing preference to equality, justice and the relief of poverty, though these too could be seen in terms of restoration as well as novelty and innovation. Driven under- ground, often excoriated by liberals and conservatives alike, reformers who sought a wide extension of manhood suffrage – the first and principal aim of most democrats in this period – came increasingly to link their demands to ‘social’ issues such as a fair wage and improved working conditions. From 1848, these were often viewed in a ‘socialist’ light, and the end of revolution construed not as ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ as such, negatively defined against despotic political rule, but as some variation of the principle of ‘association’, as opposed to individual economic competition (Proudhon 1923a, pp. 75–99). Originally conceived as a sharply defined and delimited act of rebellion, revolution came to be construed as a state of mind, a continuing process to maintain a sense of virtue and self-sacrifice en permanence. (Negatively this would be come to be seen as an Orwellian orgy of constant agitation aimed at securing conformity by a constant threat of crisis, thus justifying dictator- ship by the constant fear of threat from without.) Inspired by a Rousseauist conception of the General Will, revolutionaries would claim that that will could be represented by an elite party of committed revolutionaries rul- ing in the name of the majority. For some that party could in turn be represented by a charismatic or quasi-millenarian leader. Invoking histor- ical, constitutional or moral rights of resistance to tyranny, democrats also came, often by necessity, to embrace conspiratorial approaches to political

2 Most modern accounts of the idea of revolution commence with Arendt 1963. For examples of varying uses of the language of revolution, see Kumar 1970. 201

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek change, and sometimes the use of individual violence, ‘terror’ and assassina- tion to achieve this. The pressure for democracy, as well as increasing social equality, were thus inexorable in nineteenth-century Europe, and eventu- ally elsewhere. The Restoration of 1815 brought only a temporary lull in this pressure from below for political democracy. Reaction thus became, as it was described in the most classic statement of contemporary revolution- ism, itself the further cause of still further revolutions (Proudhon 1923a, pp. 13–39). This chapter examines the evolution of the main European radical and republican traditions in this period; their involvement in revolutionary underground movements; and the emergence of the strategy of individ- ual violence or ‘terrorism’ as a means of fulfilling revolutionary ends, and thus the mutation of the idea of collective struggle into that of individual violence. While the focus here is principally on the major European and North American traditions, some consideration is also given to their bearing on imperial and anti-imperial developments elsewhere, and on the origins of parallel, and particularly anti-imperial, non-European movements and strands of thought.

2 Radical and republican traditions Despite the American and French revolutions, and earlier examples like Switzerland, republicanism failed to become established in most of Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed on the eve of the First World War it had made little progress since 1870, France being the only major European republic. After the Restoration of 1815 the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria and Prussia wedded the ideals of throne and altar and aimed to suppress all anti-autocratic movements. Kingship also proved popular in a number of newly formed states, such as Belgium. Nonetheless there were powerful republican currents in several European nations throughout the period, and distinctive if less vibrant movements in others. Republican- ism throughout the period was initially often associated with the creation of a constitutional or limited monarchy, and rule by law as opposed to arbitrary will, where the republican component was thus the reposing of ultimate sovereignty in the people, though often with a limited suffrage based on property ownership. Opposition to aristocratic privilege, though not necessarily elite guidance, and support for formal legal equality of all cit- izens, were also prominent republican themes. Resistance to increasing eco- nomic specialisation as threatening intellectual capacity and moral integrity, 202

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism a prominent theme for eighteenth-century republicans like Adam Fergu- son, declined thereafter, though it reappeared in socialism. Throughout the nineteenth century, republicanism came increasingly to mean democracy, with an elected executive, and an increasingly extensive suffrage. But while the American model thus gained in importance throughout the century, that model itself underwent substantial alteration. Based initially on the ideal of a society of independent small farmers and freeholders, coexisting with slavery in the South, it evolved into an agglomeration of mass, urban, party-based political machines in which corruption was widespread, plu- tocracy increasingly evident, and liberty threatened by the stifling power of what Tocqueville described as the ‘tyranny of the majority’ (Tocqueville 1835–40; for the later period see Bryce 1899). Unlike European republi- canism, American republicanism was rarely anti-clerical, and gave a marked preference to liberty over equality and fraternity, except where diluted by immigrant radicalism (Higonnet 1988). Most forms of republicanism dwelt upon the virtue of patriotism and the importance of giving precedence to the public over the private interest, though this did not exclude interna- tionalist sympathies. Yet monarchs could also claim to embody the same virtues in kingship, and many newly created states in this period – Greece, Belgium, Serbia, Romania – chose the monarchical form when achieving independence. Monarchies could also extend their shelf-life by becoming empires, enhancing national glory and personal prestige, providing oppor- tunities for employment and emigration while displacing growing social pressures at home. Here nationalism and the growth of empire were thus often closely wedded. Radicalism was consequently not always republican, nor republicanism radical or democratic. Even socialists, such as Robert Blatchford in Britain, were not necessarily anti-monarchical, considering ‘a very limited monar- chy...saferandinmanywaysbetterthana republic...thereislessrisk of intrigue and corruption, and that personal ambition has less scope and power in a monarchy than in a republic’ (Clarion, 3 July 1897,p.212). Radicals throughout the nineteenth century indeed generally wished to extend the franchise in the direction of greater democracy, and to restrict aristocratic rule, but not necessarily to abolish kingship. Their philosophical first principles often rested on social contract and natural rights theories, but could also be utilitarian, notably in the case of the Benthamite ‘philosophic radicals’. Radicals tended to be more individualist, to give greater stress to liberty as a central value, and to emphasise rights; republicans tended to give preference to community, to relative social equality, and to the virtuous 203

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Britain Modern British radicalism and republicanism both commenced with the explosive debate over ‘French principles’ which followed the publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) (see Claeys 1989b, 2007a). Though no typology is uncontentious, at least five discrete if overlapping sub- divisions of republicanism can be identified in Britain in this period: (1) utopian republicanism, in which community of goods, a tradition identified with Sparta, Plato, primitive Christianity and Thomas More, is commended as the solution to poverty and inequality (e.g., An Essay on Civil Government, 1793,p.86); (2) agrarian republicanism, in which restrictions on landown- ership, once associated with the Roman republic, then the tradition revived by James Harrington, restrain inequality of wealth; this tradition includes both Paine and Thomas Spence; (3) anti-monarchical republicanism, in which the abolition of kingship and substitution of a republic, or ‘government by election’, is a central aim (Paine 1992,p.106), which in this period is mainly associated with Paine; (4) radical republicanism, in which the extension of the franchise (generally to universal male suffrage) is the chief goal; and (5) Whiggish republicanism, in which a reform of governmental finance, the restriction of the powers of the monarch and aristocracy to interfere with and dominate the House of Commons, and a general willingness to govern with the popular good or res publica in mind, are central.3 Of these forms,

3 Such goals can be associated with the Whig leader Charles James Fox in this period. Fox disavowed having ‘stated any republican principles, with regard to this country, in or out of parliament’ (Fox 1815, iv,p.209). But this must be compared with his praise for that respect for distinction shown in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome (p. 229), and Fox’s proclamation ‘that he was so far a republican, that he approved all governments where the res publica was the universal principle’ (p. 232). See also Barwis 1793:‘Andastothewordrepublic, though it be usually applied to every government without a King, yet, in its original and true signification, (the public weal) some Kings, at least, have so well understood, and attended to the public weal, that their governments might much more justly merit the appellation of republican, than many of those which are always denominated republican, though often severe and tyrannical enemies to the public weal, and liberties of their countries’ (Claeys 1995, vii,p.380). Paine also argued that ‘What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government. 204

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(1) would be largely subsumed by socialism by 1840,(2) would be taken up by Spenceanism, and the later land nationalisation movement; (3) would emerge chiefly after 1848 in the writings of W. J. Linton, but thereafter vir- tually die out; and (4) would gradually overtake (5) throughout the course of the nineteenth and then twentieth centuries. The lineages of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republicanism into this period have been the subject of considerable controversy (see Pocock 1985). By con- trast those linking the 1790s to the nineteenth century have been more neglected, partly because previous languages and paradigms disappear or become unrecognisable after the French Revolution (but see Burrow 1988; Philp 1998; Wootton 1994). Generally speaking the term ‘radical’ was used in Britain during the 1790s to indicate a desire for democratic constitutional reform, and particularly the extension of the franchise, with ‘radicalism’, as defined by the early historiography (e.g. Daly 1892; Kent 1899), emerging c.1819 to describe the movement associated with such reformers. Within this group disagreements existed about how far the franchise should be extended, whether a secret ballot should be used, whether Members of Parliament should be paid, and so on. Further issues included the reduction of taxation and the expense of the monarchy and government, the extension of religious toleration, and the curtailment of patronage. Sociologically,radicalism was often associated with the plight of small producers, whether in agriculture or commerce, engaged in an often bitter, protracted and eventually usually futile competition with larger capitalists. In Britain the plebeian branch of this movement was generally commit- ted to universal manhood suffrage. In its early years its aims were often couched in traditional, even ‘romantic’ terms, more often evoking a nos- talgia for a lost society of yeomanry or peasant-proprietors than seeking a new-modelled democratic republic, and hostile to Jacobinical theorising while condemning the ‘Old Corruption’ of an extravagant government and profligate aristocracy (see Spence 1996). Before 1820 it rallied around the prominent radicals (both disavowed republicanism) William Cobbett (1763–1835) (see Cobbett 1836,p.159) and Henry Hunt (1770–1835) (see Hunt 1820, i,p.505). It then re-emerged as Chartism in the years from 1836 to the mid-1850s, and helped achieve two acts of parliamentary reform

It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter, or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public thing’(Paine1992,p.140). 205

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(1867, 1884) thereafter. But the attainment of the franchise was also widely regarded as a means to other ends, including poor law reform, the alleviation of restrictions on trade unions, factory reform and freedom of the press. The middle-class counterpart to this movement was led by Jeremy Ben- tham (1748–1832) and his followers, such as Sir William Molesworth, often referred to as ‘Philosophic Radicals’ or ‘advanced’ liberals, who for a short time mustered a faction of some note in Parliament, though their influence has been claimed to have been much more extensive (Dicey 1914). Their views overlapped on some issues with those of Richard Cobden (1804–65) and John Bright (1811–89), whose radicalism focused on the peaceful pro- motion of free trade, extending the franchise and reducing the expenses of government, the Crown and imperial expansion. Their great legislative suc- cess was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (see Adelman 1984; Belchem 1986;Harris1885;Wright1988). Amongst these movements Chartism, despite its ideological heterogene- ity, was by far the largest, and in the long term the most influential.4 Com- mencing in 1836, it agreed on a six-point programme, focusing on universal male suffrage, and petitioned Parliament in three great campaigns. Divided most notably over the issues of ‘moral force’ versus ‘physical force’ reform, it became associated during the mid-1840s with the ‘Land Plan’, a scheme for small-scale peasant proprietorship promoted by Feargus O’Connor. Ple- beian radicalism faltered in England during the high Victorian period, but began to recover in the late 1860s, when the movement for female enfran- chisement also began in earnest after the artisan elite received the vote in 1867 (Finn 1993; Gillespie 1927;Taylor1995). In addition, the rapid growth of trade union organisation in the last third of the century ensured that issues important to the ‘labour aristocracy’ came increasingly to the fore. From the 1880s the rise of socialism divided the labour movement, but also has- tened the creation of an independent labour party. From 1880 a distinctive ‘Radical Programme’ also emerged which identified the radical wing of the Liberal Party with Irish reform, particularly the ‘three F’s’ of fair rents, free sale and fixity of tenure. Various ‘collectivist’ measures of domestic reform, notably respecting working-class housing and health, agricultural wages and tenancy, disestablishment of the state church, the extension of education and the reform of the taxation and municipal government, also

4 The literature on Chartism is, again, very extensive. The chief contemporary estimate is Gammage 1854. For a summary of modern scholarship, see Chase 2006 and Thompson 1986.Ontheleading theoretical controversies, see Stedman Jones 1983a. 206

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British republicanism Even the most popular monarchy in Europe, celebrated for the stabilis- ing effects of its pomp and ceremony (notably by Bagehot, 1867), had its opponents, though these were relatively few throughout much of the century (see A. Taylor 1996, 1999, 2004; Williams 1997). Indeed, the vet- eran Whig radical Henry Brougham lamented in 1840 that ‘in point of weight from property, rank, and capacity’, the republicans were ‘a most inconsiderable minority’ (Brougham 1840,p.4). The tradition established by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) never entirely disappeared, with birthday celebrations continuing well into the nineteenth century. Writers like Richard Carlile, editor of The Republican (1819–26) (for whom republi- canism meant simply ‘a government which consults the public interest’, The Republican, 27 August 1819, p. ix), kept the sacred flames alight, and assured an intimate association between secularism or freethought and republi- canism in Britain (Royle 1974, 1980). During the late 1830sand1840s a variety of Chartist writers toyed with republican themes, though the movement as a whole never embraced the ideal, and when the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor was accused of being a republican, he retorted that he did not care whether the Queen or the Devil sat on the throne (Hughes 1918,p.158). Many Chartists continued to embrace the Ameri- can model, though disillusionment at the growth of social inequality in the United States commenced in this period. At the time of the revolutions of 1848 some associated with the movement openly avowed themselves ‘ardent Republicans...anxious...toexpressourallegiance to the only legitimate source of authority, the Sovereign People’ (Harding 1848, p. iii). After 1848 its socialist rump was led by Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney, whose Red Republican preached a virulent revolutionary doctrine. For many years afterwards the Chartist leader James Bronterre O’Brien would continue to champion the cause of land reform and nationalisation, his followers being 207

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek particularly prominent in the International Working Men’s Association, founded in 1864. Following the 1848 continental revolutions the republican cause enjoyed a temporary surge of enthusiasm, particularly as a result of the influence of Mazzini, though the latter was principally a nationalist and little interested in constitutional forms. His great supporter was the engraver William James Linton, a leading opponent of ‘the possibility of a kingly republicanism’ (Linton 1893,p.47). His The English Republic (1851–5), if it had a limited circulation, nonetheless revealed how far a powerful mix of charisma, reli- gion and nationalism could enthuse British radicals with an ideal of duty based upon ‘sacrifice, service, endeavour, the devotion of all the faculties possessed and all the powers acquired to the welfare and improvement of humanity’ (Adams 1903, i,p.265). Linton’s republicanism subscribed to the ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity and association, and commended state education, the state provision of credit for the working classes, and an oppo- sition to monarchy as tyranny in principle. But it also opposed socialism where the state acted as ‘the director and dictator of labour’, thus violating individual liberty, instead of protecting labour against capital, and giving the cultivator the opportunity of land ownership (Linton n.d., p. 2). It rep- resented the first impressive British effort to wed the seventeenth-century republicanism of Milton, Cromwell, Ireton and Vane to that of Mazzini, Herzen, Kossuth and the causes of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and other subject European peoples. Auguste Comte’s followers in Britain also kept the sacred flames of republicanism alight after the decline of Chartism, with Frederic Harrison insisting that the only legitimate government was republican, which was synonymous with entrusting power to those fit to rule, working in the interests of all, ‘never in the interest of any class or order’, and whose adoption was ‘as certain as the rising of tomorrow’s sun’ (Harrison 1875,pp.116–22;Harrison1901,p.20; Fortnightly Review, ns 65, June 1872,p.613). John Ruskin, too, lent some support to the ideal.5 Republicanism and socialism were thus distinctive if sometimes overlapping entities throughout this period. Inspired by the downfall of the Second Empire in France, and antipathy to the ‘despotic’ principles of German expansionism, with which Queen

5 Ruskin proclaimed that ‘A republic means, properly, a polity in which the state, with its all, is at every man’s service, and every man, with his all, at the state’s service – (people are apt to lose sight of the last condition), but its government may nevertheless be oligarchic (consular, or decemviral, for instance), or monarchic (dictatorial)’ (Ruskin 1872, ii,pp.129–30). Thanks to Jose Harris for indicating this usage. 208

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Victoria was identified by birth (McCarthy 1871,pp.30–40), republicanism in Britain enjoyed its greatest flowering in the early 1870s, but declined by 1874. Following the foundation of the Land and Labour League in 1869, some eighty-five republican clubs were established between 1871 and 1874, and a National Republican League formed in 1872. Supporters condemned the monarchy as simply ‘immoral’ in principle (Holyoake 1873,p.1), and enthused that ‘great numbers of people are beginning to advocate republican principles’ (Barker 1873,p.3). Respectable radicals, catching the sense of the moment, waded into the fray. At a speech in Newcastle in 1871, and then elsewhere, Sir Charles Dilke addressed the theme of ‘Representation and Royalty’, and offered a critique of royal finance, moving for a parliamentary enquiry into the issue in March 1872 (see Taylor 2000). But anti-republican riots dogged his course. The increasing appositeness of the American model after the Reform Act of 1884 naturally enhanced discussion of its virtues amongst sympathisers, though even here there were dissenting voices (e.g. Conway 1872). Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91) was the single most important British republican of the late Victorian period, and was most influential in yoking republicanism to freethought, as well as opposition to socialism (Bonner 1895; Gossman 1962). Yet his rhetoric was more extreme than his prin- ciples, and his few attempts to found any formal republican organisation were reluctant, and accompanied by disclaimers of any haste in securing their ultimate political end (D’Arcy 1982). The illness of Queen Victoria in 1871, and her return to duties after a decade of mourning, helped to restore her prestige, while Disraeli gave increasing stress to the superiority of the British constitution over the American (e.g. Watts 1873,p.1). The decline of republicanism was clearly intimately interwoven with the expan- sion of empire, and with Disraeli’s enhancement of the Queen’s imperial role. Critics threatened that ‘the day that we proclaim a Republic in this Coun- try, our Colonies are lost, and we sink into insignificance’ (Ashley 1873,p.19). English reaction to the was generally negative, and even English republicans were divided, Frederic Harrison being more favourable, Bradlaugh, increasingly opposed to the First International, less so. By 1899, it was claimed, there was only one avowed republican in the House of Com- mons – the Irishman Michael Davitt (Davidson 1899,p.386, and generally Moody 1981). Republicanism also developed in a number of British colonies in this period, at least in theory, notably in Australia. Here, as early as 1852,it was being proclaimed (by John Dunmore Lang, but without much popular 209

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Ireland A separate parliamentary group of Irish radicals kept up pressure for political and social (and especially land) reform there throughout the period. The leading nationalist movement of the early part of the century was led by Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), whose chief goal was the restoration of the Irish parliament, and who famously argued that ‘No Revolution is worth the spilling of a single drop of blood’ (White 1913,p.81). Rejecting the United Irish ‘vain desire of republican institutions’ (O’Connell 1846, ii, p. 113), he promoted instead moderate parliamentary reform and liberal economic policies. Catholic Emancipation was achieved in 1828,butinthe 1840s O’Connell failed to achieve ‘repeal’ (of the 1801 Act of Union which abolished the independent Irish parliament). His most famous successor was Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91), the ‘Uncrowned King of Ireland’, president of the Land League and leader of the Irish parliamentary party in the 1880s, who promoted a policy of land reform and then, increasingly, peasant proprietorship, and an independent Irish parliament.

Irish republicanism Nineteenth-century Irish republicanism dates from the controversy sur- rounding the French Revolution debate and Paine’s Rights of Man. Its roots, however, lie in earlier ‘True Whig’ and ‘Patriot’ thought, epitomised by an opposition to the ‘tyranny’ of a despotic executive, standing armies and the landed oligarchy, but where English ethnic domination also played a major role in diluting a vocabulary of ancient constitutionalism and natural rights and later Catholic rights and even separatism (see Small 2002, and more generally Connolly 2000). Some reformers, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald, visited France soon after the Revolution and imbibed republican principles there (Moore 1831, i,p.166). As the 1790s progressed other reformers like Wolfe Tone moved from seeking independence under ‘any form of gov- ernment’ (Tone 1827, i,p.70) towards accepting both a broader franchise 210

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism and, eventually, a more democratic republicanism. For many, particularly the Dissenters, this was synonymous with self-government (Byrne 1910, p. 4; Tone 1827, ii,pp.18, 26). With the formation of the United Irish- men in 1792, Painite republicanism and Irish self-rule fused in a mixture that was separatist by 1796 and revolutionary by 1798 (see McBride 2000). Many even of the most prominent leaders of the uprising of 1798,however, had no settled political ideas beyond a desire for national independence; the rebel General Joseph Holt admitted to being ‘not very well up to republican notions’ when questioned (Holt 1838, ii,p.69). Irish republicanism in the mid-nineteenth century continued this trend. The revolutionaries of 1848 had no elaborate political theory, but aimed chiefly at nationhood. Thomas Davis, for instance, while agreeing to support a federative government, said ‘If not, then anything but what we are’ (quoted in Lynd 1912,p.224), and even admitted the possibility of ‘royal republics’ as a viable model (Davis 1890,p.280). When another ’48-er, John Mitchel, declared for republicanism, his view was later recalled to have been ‘an altogether unexpected development’, since he had himself written of his comrades that ‘theories of government have but little interest for them; that the great want and unvarying aim of them all is a National Government’, which might include a monarchy (Duffy 1898, i,p.262n; Dillon 1888, ii, p. 130). Many were also later vexed by Mitchel’s overt support of slavery and ‘an Irish republic with an accompaniment of slave plantations’ in the early 1850s (he went on to fight for the South in the US Civil War) (Dillon 1888, ii,pp.48–9). Even such a sophisticated social and political theorist as Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, who favoured nationalisation of the land (with Henry George as a key influence) and state socialism (Davitt 1885, ii,pp.69–142), wrote little about republicanism as such, while hoping for the emergence of a labour party in Britain. But the Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in 1858, settled at least in part on a number of leading principles, though these were of course also contested. They included the expropriation of lands whose proprietors were absentees or inactive, and of church lands; the sale of such lands to create a new peasantry; the abolition of hereditary titles; the provision of an elected parliament, one-third of which would be by universal suffrage; the erection of provincial councils; and the toleration of all religions, but secularisation of education (Rutherford 1877, i,pp.68–9). Some later Irish republicans were also principally nationalists and not necessarily anti-monarchical; Patrick Pearse for instance thought a German prince could well serve as sovereign of an independent Ireland. 211

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France In France a radical movement existed continuously from the time of the Revolution of 1789 which inherited the traditions of Rousseau and Jacobin- ism, transformed these through the writings of Babeuf, Blanqui, Proudhon and Blanc, and can be distinguished by its defence of the small producer, artisan and peasant against big capital, and the advocacy of greater democ- racy, social equality, civil rights and nationalism (Loubere` 1974). France was the most continuously revolutionary society in Europe through the nine- teenth century, experiencing moderate upheaval in 1830, and more epochal transformations in 1848 and 1871. Its radicalism was thus often republican and revolutionary, though there was no single tradition associated with the ‘principles of ’89’ as such. Within this movement, instead, more moder- ate and extremist wings contended for public opinion, with Jacobins and republicans again rising to prominence during the 1848 Revolution. Radi- calism spread more successfully to the countryside in the second half of the century, linking itself to wine-growing interests in the south, and pressing for constitutional reforms such as a unicameral legislature with the Senate and President abolished, though not female enfranchisement. Some radi- cals by the 1880s urged nationalisation of the railways, mines and banks, the regulation of working hours and conditions, cheap credit and gov- ernment support for co-operatives. By the turn of the century many of these issues were identified with socialism, though of a more moderate and non-revolutionary type, and radicalism declined.

French republicanism The French Revolution was by no means inevitably anti-monarchical in tendency, and controversy as to the advantages of retaining modified king- ship was already evident in the debate between Thomas Paine and the Abbe´ Sieyes` in August 1791. Here Paine defended republicanism as ‘simply a gov- ernment by representation’ (Paine 1908, iii,p.9), while Sieyes` indicated the dangers of an elected executive, contending instead for retaining a monarch to represent the nation as a whole (Sieyes` 2003,p.169). Such arguments would later prove compelling to many, and Sieyes’` ideas would prove impor- tant under the more conservative phase of the Revolution embodied in the Directory. Beforehand, however, French republicanism inherited its chief concerns from the Convention and the first Commune of Paris, which emerged in August 1792, set the Revolution on a more radical course, and 212

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism strenuously opposed both the monarchy and priesthood (see Fisher 1911; Pilbeam 1995; Plamenatz 1952; and Soltau 1931). The first Commune and the Jacobin Club organised the insurrection of 10 August 1792, and estab- lished the pattern of radical, as well as Parisian, rebellion against central government in the name of the people as a whole. An insurrection led by Marat and Robespierre on 31 May 1793 led to the National Assembly being overwhelmed by mob rule. (But to its supporters both then and later this was the sole means by which democracy could be protected; e.g. O’Brien 1859,p.27.) The arrest and execution of the moderate Girondins, and a period of radical rule, followed. Church lands had been deemed national property in 1790, and some emigr´ e´ lands sold. An even larger transfer was proposed by a decree of February 1794, but this was aborted when the Ter- ror was overthrown on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794). These measures were, however, populist rather than socialist, and aimed at allaying the problems of poverty and scarcity of food which threatened the Revolution itself from within. (Republicans generated their own account of political economy in the same period; see Whatmore 2000.) Universal male suffrage (though indirect) was briefly achieved at this time, and again in 1848,butwithdrawn quickly. Following the Restoration of 1815 the republicans won their next great victory with the ejection of Charles X after three days’ street fighting in 1830, only to have the institution of monarchy stabilised by the accession of the Duke of Orleans, Louis Philippe. At this time the republican camp was divided into four main sections: the moderates, who were the largest group, led by Godefroy Cavaignac; the radicals or Jacobins, whose chief aim was manhood suffrage; the social reformers, many of whom, like Cabet, the Fourierists and Saint-Simonians, were anti-revolutionary and often unin- terested in politics; and the revolutionaries (Plamenatz 1952,p.39). A fifth group, the Catholic Liberals led by the Abbe´ de Lammenais, tried to bridge the gap between the church and democracy. But such categories were elastic rather than exclusive, and many reformers belonged to several groupings. The Second Republic, founded in February 1848, and led by men like Ledru-Rollin, Lamartine and Louis Blanc, was also short-lived. Its leading characteristic was the popularisation of socialist ideas on a widespread scale for the first time, notably Blanc’s national workshop scheme and proposals for the ‘right to work’. Moderates found themselves challenged by insur- rectionists, including Blanqui, in May–June, but the latter were defeated after much bloodshed, and only succeeded in tainting the radical cause in the eyes of public opinion. Following an interim government headed by 213

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Louis Eugene` Cavaignac, Louis Bonaparte was elected President. But he then staged a coup d’etat´ on 2 December 1851, which resulted in the Sec- ond Empire. A period of severe repression followed, in which over 26,000 republicans were arrested and tried by special tribunals. Ledru-Rollin, Blanc and others were driven into exile, where some collaborated in the Euro- pean Central Democratic Committee, formed in (Lattek 2006,pp. 87–95). Many moderates remained in France, and succeeded in making republicanism a respectable cause over the next two decades. But disagree- ments over the extent of social reform needed, and correspondingly the viability of laisser-faire liberalism to solve social problems, continued to fos- ter division. The Third Republic, announced in September 1870 after France’s defeat by Prussia, was formally established in 1875. With extremism discredited after the failure of the Commune, lawyers and middle-class merchants pre- dominated amongst its supporters, with an influential sprinkling of artists like Manet, and an increasing numbers of Jews, women and Freemasons, who tended to promote a more secular approach to public culture. Its lead- ing light was Leon´ Gambetta (1838–82), whose great aim was sustaining a centralised regime based on universal suffrage and free compulsory secu- lar education long enough to build a modern democracy upon a patriotic foundation, no matter what compromises, notably in religious and for- eign policy, his ‘opportunist’ policies demanded (see Nord 1995). In the interim, support was given to the republican ideal, amongst others, by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), whose followers, if suspicious of democracy, were nevertheless often inveterate opponents of monarchy.

The Paris Commune An influential if much debated republican model during the late nineteenth century was that associated with the Paris Commune, the revolutionary organisation which emerged after France’s defeat by Prussia in the 1870–1 war (see generally Lissagaray 1886). Following the declaration by Jules Favre, Leon´ Gambetta and others on 4 September 1870 of a ‘Government of National Defence’, and preceded by communes in Lyon and Marseille, the Paris Commune proper was declared on 18 March 1871.Itwasratified by communal elections in which a number of workers and some leading members of the International Working Men’s Association were returned. Inspired more by Proudhon than Rousseau, it collapsed into bloodbath in April–May 1871, only to have its republican aspirations reaffirmed by the 214

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National Assembly in February 1875. The Commune’s policy was rigor- ously anti-centralist. Taxation, the direction of local business, the magis- tracy, police and education were all to be controlled locally, and a standing army supplanted by a civic militia. Officers of the National Guard were to be elected, and liberty of conscience and work was also guaranteed. The Commune was thus a government at once republican, local, anti-centralist, in possession of its own militia and representative of working-class elements. The Commune of Paris, in particular, indicated that such powers would be utilised in a socialist direction; provincial organisations, it was realised, might not follow suit. To the socialists, the Commune symbolised a move to divide France into a republic in which autonomous communes sent representatives to a federative council, and in which Paris was freed from the conservative weight of the provinces, a majority oppression caused by ‘the dogma of universal suffrage’. To anarchists like Bakunin it was ‘a bold and outspoken negation of the State, and the opposite of an authoritarian communist form of political organisation’ (Bakunin 1973,p.199). To Marx, who had caustically dismissed the commune idea in 1866 as ‘Proudhonised Stirnerianism’ (Marx and Engels 1987,p.287), its popular character as a ‘social republic’, the ‘self-government of the producers’, with all public functionaries elected, paid workmen’s wages and directly responsible to the Commune, was the ‘direct antithesis’ of the old state apparatus. (Some have taken such comments as a concession to Proudhon and the anarchists, e.g. Collins and Abramsky 1965,p.207.) It was thus the model which should be established everywhere, with rural delegates being sent to towns, and district assemblies sending deputies to Paris, thus ending ‘the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself’ (Marx and Engels 1971,pp.72–4). To some revolutionaries it also necessitated a temporary dictatorship to meet the threat from without, as in 1793, as well as from within, from a treacherous National Assembly which made peace with Germany in early 1871. Towards the end of this period a revolutionary syndicalist movement, centred in the Confed´ eration´ Gen´ erale´ du Travail, founded at Limoges in 1895, also arose in France (see Jennings 1990;Ridley1970). It agreed with Marx generally on the theory of the class war, placing greater emphasis however on strikes, and especially the general strike, as its manifestation. Its ultimate aim was also the abolition of the state, bureaucracy, police, army and legal apparatus, with confederated labour supplying all these functions in the future. This strategy was to meet with support from Georges Sorel, amongst others, though the movement rapidly became reformist. 215

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Germany In Germany ‘French ideas’ after 1789, while ambiguously accepted as imposed by a conqueror during the revolutionary wars, left a legacy of secularism, anti-parochial nationalism and an appeal to popular sovereignty which was not easily suppressed (Blanning 1983; Gooch 1927). The mod- ern democratic movement emerged in the Vormarz¨ period and reached its first apogee during the Frankfurt parliament at the time of the 1848 revolu- tions (see Sperber 1991). Theoretically, German radicalism also received an important impetus from the circle of ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians to which Marx belonged, including Ludwig Feuerbach and Arnold Ruge (Breckman 1999; Moggach 2006). Some of this group, like Bakunin, became anarchists; others, like Ruge, remained radical democrats and republicans. Marx pro- gressed to communism, promoting the necessity of violent revolution from the mid-1840s onwards. The young Engels, too, certainly exalted the thera- peutic effects of proletarian revolutionary violence. Both later accepted the possibility, however, that the transition to socialism might be peaceful, where democratic processes permitted it, though this was not a view accepted by all later Marxists. By the early twentieth century the term ‘radical’ came increasingly also to be used in reference to right-wing movements, which association, as rechtsradikal, it often retains today. In the latter decades of the century the term ‘radical’ came moreover in some circles to be associated with a movement of moral and cultural reform, in which the idea of surpassing or transcending existing norms, ‘bourgeois’ or otherwise, but especially moral restraints upon individual self-expression and creativity, was central. Some of these concepts were indebted to the more individualistic forms of earlier nineteenth-century anarchism, in Germany notably that of Max Stirner, whose The Ego and His Own appeared in 1845. Stirner in turn has been controversially linked to Friedrich Nietzsche, and described as presenting a ‘remarkable antici- pation...ofNietzsche’sdoctrineoftheSuperman,andthedemandfora “transvaluation of all values” beyond all current standards of good and evil’ (Muirhead 1915,p.68). How far Nietzsche himself regarded the Superman ideal as ‘radical’ can be contested; he certainly spoke of desiring a ‘radical’ cure to social malaise and/or seeking ‘radical’ change (e.g. Nietzsche 1903, para. 534), but did not use the term positively in a primarily political sense. Some recent accounts have, however, suggested that to the degree that Niet- zsche was a ‘political’ thinker at all, his ideas should be conceived in terms of a ‘politics of aristocratic radicalism’ (Detwiler 1990). Here the Superman 216

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism ideal functions ‘radically’ to subvert democracy, and to reimpose upon the ‘mass’ or ‘herd’ a higher ethical ideal, based also in part, if again controver- sially, upon a Social Darwinist conception of evolutionary type. This was to be accomplished by recreating what Nietzsche termed ‘the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods)’ (Nietzsche 1910,p.30), an ideal also based in part upon Nietzsche’s con- ception of the Greek polis and its valuation of goodness, truth and beauty. ‘Radicalism’ thus describes a reversion to a purer or original moral type, in Nietzsche’s case prior to a Judaeo-Christian ‘transvaluation’ of values, in order to avoid a ‘nihilist’ endpoint, God having been pronounced dead, and the subversion of all other myths being one of Nietzsche’s central aims. Hence a new value was to be imposed both upon the individual, in terms of self-mastery, and upon society, in terms of the ‘will to power’, Nietzsche’s central and much contested concept. Whatever the merits of this descrip- tion of Nietzsche’s aims, various of his followers certainly assumed that the master’s aim could be adapted to shoring up the existing patrician order (e.g. Ludovici 1915). In Germany republicanism emerged as a serious alternative during the 1848 revolutions, under the leadership of men like Friedrich Hecker, Carl Schurz and Gustav von Struve, though many radicals preferred the creation of an empire to that of a republic. Defeated in the Frankfurt parliament of April 1848, the republicans, whose strength lay chiefly in the south-west, were beaten in the field by Prussia by early 1849. Republicanism enjoyed intermittent support in other European countries in the later nineteenth century. In Spain a republic was declared in 1873, but suffered four coups d’etat´ and the rule of five presidents before collapsing in 1875.

The United States All American political thought is republican in the sense of denying the effi- cacy of monarchy, but the democratic extension of the franchise occurred only gradually through this period. Nineteenth-century American radical- ism was born from the more populist interpretation of the principles of 1776, often associated with Thomas Jefferson, and linked to the growing inequality of wealth, one critic by the mid-1830s denouncing ‘what we call a Republican government’ as ‘sheer aristocracy’ (Brown 1834,p.43). It received an impetus from generations of foreign radical emigr´ es,´ from British democrats fleeing repression in the 1790s (Twomey 1989) to Germans after 217

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1848 (Pozzetta 1981; Wittke 1952; Zucker 1950), and Poles, Russians and Jews in later decades (Johnpoll 1981;Pope2001). Domestically, it evolved as a consequence of industrialisation, growing social inequality, and such issues as banking and the control of the money supply, which spawned the Free Silver and Greenback movements, and the growth of ‘trusts’ or economic monopolies, particularly the railways, and anti-union activity. It produced a variety of movements, from Jacksonian Radicalism in the 1830s through the radical democracy of Locofocoism and Free Democracy in the 1850s and 1860s, to Abolitionism and various forms of agrarian populism, like the Grange movement, consumer and producer co-operation, and social- ism, both domestic and foreign in inspiration. Occasionally proposals for a republican agrarian law were mooted (e.g. Campbell 1848,pp.110–18). In the later century a number of prominent leaders emerged, notably Henry Demarest Lloyd (see Lloyd 1894), and even more, Henry George, whose single-tax theory was of worldwide influence (see George 1879). Following the example of the British experiment at Freetown, freed slaves established a variety of separatist and pan-Africanist movements, resulting, amongst other things, in the founding of the colony, then later the state, of Liberia in 1822 (Hall 1978; McAdoo 1983;Robinson2001).

Non-European anti-imperial revolutionary and resistance movements The nineteenth century was the period of the greatest imperial expan- sion in European, North American and Russian history, resulting in the deaths of at least thirty million people and, when poverty-fuelled famine and civil war exacerbated by foreign intervention are included, possibly 100 million. Some of these conquests were almost openly genocidal in intent; that is to say, the near-extermination of native populations, often masked by a Social Darwinist discourse on ‘inferior’ races, was an expected, accepted, and even desired outcome of conquest. Such expansion was, however, usually described in terms of the need for territory, raw mate- rials and new markets (see Claeys 2010). But conquest was everywhere resisted, and here European ideals of revolution, freedom, equality and jus- tice intermingled with adherence to and renovation of traditional forms of polity and social and religious organisation (Wesseling 1978 and Bayly, this volume). In the early nineteenth century the most notable extra-European rev- olutionary developments were in Latin and South America (see Ander- son 1991,pp.47–82; Schroeder 1998; and generally Gurr 1970). Following 218

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Spain’s defeat by Napoleon in 1808, Venezueladeclared itself an independent republic in 1811, Chile proclaimed a provisional constitution in 1812,both only to suffer defeats by royalist forces. In 1821, Spanish rule was overthrown in Mexico, and by 1825, when Simon´ Bol´ıvar captured Upper Peru, Spain was left with a tenuous hold on the New World, retaining only Puerto Rico and Cuba. Brazil became independent in 1822, first under a monarchy, then, from 1889, a republic. The importation of ideas of popular sovereignty, par- ticipation and representation from Spanish resistance to Napoleon assisted this process. But conservative notions of independence more accommo- dating to political elites, who often allied with military leaders, tended to take precedence over those based on French ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, despite the more revolutionary aspirations of Francisco de Miranda, and others (Rodriguez 1997,p.122). The sentiments of Bernardo O’Higgins, who proclaimed that he detested ‘aristocracy . . . beloved equal- ity is my idol’ (quoted in Lynch 1986,p.142), were thus comparatively rare. If Borbon absolutism was unattractive, political participation still remained limited to the elite, with high property qualifications for the franchise. More liberal political ideas tended to follow rather than precede rebellion, and were often resisted by both white and Creole elites fearing ethnic unrest from darker-skinned slaves, natives and peasants. Ethnic diversity, despite some social banditry and slave revolts, generally inhibited the formation of national identities in the new states, with American-born Creole elites often siding with Spain (Macfarlane and Posada-Carbo´ 1999,pp.1–12). But an emergent anti-Spanish ‘American’ identity was also marked (Lynch 1986,pp.1–2). Secularising trends were rare. Ideas of state intervention to promote education and prosperity, such as those proposed by O’Higgins, as well as economic protectionism, attracted greater support than those of laisser-faire. Republicanism was common. But even liberals like Bol´ıvar, the first president of Columbia, who upheld principles like judicial review and a restraint of presidential power, and eventually turned against slavery, insisted on a strong executive and a franchise limited by property ownership and literacy (Lynch 2006,pp.144–5). Caudillism, or the emergence of regional warlords hostile to centralised authority, often followed revolutionary wars. Mexico settled on an emperor, and monarchist sentiments were evident amongst leaders like Jose´ de San Martin. Insurrection centred on Caracas, Buenos Aires and Santiago, while Mexico City was initially integral to the defence of Spanish rule, and Cuba did not successfully rebel until the end of the century. The process of national independence was thus an exception- ally uneven one, with modernising elites playing a key role in determining 219

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Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism commonly defined less by class consciousness than antagonism towards the colonial elite, whether European or co-opted natives, and less by nation- alism than regional or tribal loyalty, or adherence to a charismatic, usually prophetic, leader (Adas 1987; Thrupp 1970). In the largest European empire, rejection of British rule by native popu- lations occurred throughout this period. Aboriginal resistance developed in Australia from the period of first occupation in 1788, led initially between 1790 and 1802 by one Pemulwuy, and continued throughout the nineteenth century. Revolts were brutally repressed, and aboriginal lands, often declared terra nullius, or unoccupied, were seized without compensation (Reynolds 1982). Divided by linguistic difference and tribal antagonism, lacking an authoritarian political or military structure, native peoples rarely engaged in concerted rebellion, though drilling and organisation were sometimes in evidence. ‘Domesticated’ natives also sometimes organised attacks on set- tlers (Robinson and York 1977,pp.5, 11). Escaped convicts like George Clarke, who painted his body like a native, also occasionally assisted aborig- inal raids on settlements (Robinson and York 1977,p.120). Tribal law was sometimes used as justification for armed rebellion, but massacre and forced resettlement eventually curtailed resistance (Newbury, 1999). In Tasmania the struggle, eventually ending in genocide, lasted from 1804 to 1834. Con- flict intensified during the Black War of 1827–30, and racial enmity reached new depths of bitterness. Between 20,000 and 50,000 natives probably died violent deaths throughout the century in Australia (Reynolds 1982,pp. 122–3). Though inhibited by inter-tribal rivalry, the Maori resistance in New Zealand, lasting from 1843–72, was better organised, more prolonged, and eventually, with the cession of valuable land rights, vastly more successful (Ryan and Parham, 2002). Here resistance in the 1860s was led by the Maori- Christian hybrid religious movement, the Hau Hau, under the prophet Te Ua Haumene. Equally formidable opponents were the Zulus, who inflicted serious losses on Britain at Ishlandwana in 1879 (Chikeka 2004;Crais1991; Jaffe 1994). In Canada, the British faced both a native population and disaf- fected French habitants, who, together with English-Canadian radicals led by William Lyon Mackenzie, staged a rebellion, with Louis Papineau, in 1837, which aimed at secession and the creation of an independent republic (see Read 1896). There was also resistance in West Africa (Pawlikova-Vilhanova 1988), Malaya (see Nonini 1992), Burma and elsewhere. Memorable there- after as perhaps the most symbolically significant anti-imperialist victory of the period was the loss of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum in 1885. 221

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Here Muslim revivalists conducting a jihad, or holy war, led by the Mahdi, overwhelmed British forces and established an Islamic republic which lasted until 1898 (Holt 1970;Nicoll2004;Wingate1968). By far the most important instance of large-scale rebellion in the British Empire was the Indian or Sepoy Mutiny of 1857–8, also called the First Indian War of Independence. The grievances underlying it were more broadly social, ethnic and religious than political, though a sentiment of Indian nationalism was both a cause and consequence of the growing disaf- fection of Britain’s Indian subjects. It is now widely recognised that deep- seated resentment of European rule, and especially religious proselytism, were crucial sources of this war. Interference with native customs like sati, or widow-burning, and of course the affair of the greased cartridges, affect- ing Hindu and Muslim alike, the ostensible, but really only final cause of the outbreak, were also germane (see Srivastava, 1997). The reinstatement of Mughal rule, partly in response to the East India Company’s treatment of the King of Delhi, was certainly also a motivating factor, though when Delhi was seized a council of twelve was erected which disregarded the King’s authority (Buckler 1922,pp.71–100). Being soldiers, the revolution- aries were far better organised than other indigenous rebels in this period, and many retained their pre-existing command structures throughout the struggle. Their professional grievances are now recognised as central to the Mutiny itself (David 2002,p.398). Native officers, often ambitious profes- sionals fairly anticipating greater promotion prospects under a native than the Company government, also provided a cadre of sophisticated and effec- tive leaders, some of whom sought more directly political ends. In annexed Oudh the revolt assumed the form of a popular movement in support of king and country (Metcalfe 1974,p.37). But recent studies, challenging the idea that the revolt was a war of national independence, have concluded that nowhere did a general anti-Europeanism emerge, though the gap between native and Briton had been growing since the 1820s (Chowdhury 1965; David 2002,p.39; Sengupta 1975,p.9). Though most natives remained loyal to British rule, the rebellion might well have succeeded had anticipated Persian and Russian assistance arrived. It met with sympathy from educated Russian and Chinese opinion, and provided a vital precedent for later anti- imperial struggles, some of which emerged from an increasingly radical Bengali intellectual milieu (MacMann 1935,pp.40–69; Majumedar 1962; Pal 1991). The Indian Congress Movement emerged in 1885 out of the spirit of post-Mutiny nationalism and both Hindu and Muslim revivalism, and was assisted in part by Allan Octavian Hume, the son of a prominent 222

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English radical of the preceding generation, Joseph Hume, and later, by the socialist Annie Besant (Lovett 1920). Various European upheavals also had an impact on other parts of the world. The revolutions of 1848 had a considerable if delayed impact, gen- erally by encouraging greater egalitarianism, the growth of participatory politics, anti-slavery sentiments, the diffusion of socialist ideas and a ‘social’ critique of liberalism, in Chile, Peru, Mexico and other parts of Latin and Southern America during subsequent decades (Thomson 2002). The growth of nationalistic sentiment and ‘patriotic’ resistance to European imperialism sometimes spurred greater repression, however, as in the case of the partly Christian-inspired anti-Tartar (but also anti-opium) Taiping rev- olutionary movement (1850–65). Here secret societies attempted to create a theocracy based upon a fraternity of kings, and encouraged some redistribu- tion of wealth to the poor. They were only defeated with Western assistance, at the cost of many millions of lives (Clarke and Gregory 1982; Cohen 1965; Michael 1966). Suppression of the fanatically anti-Christian, anti-foreign and anti-Manchu spontaneous peasant upheaval known as the Boxer Rebel- lion in China of 1900, which marked an important stage in China’s quest for independence (Keown-Boyd 1991;Purcell1963), also further hastened Western penetration of the region. It was accompanied by unprecedented looting and the wanton destruction of China’s cultural heritage.

3 Secret societies and revolutionary conspiracies The politics of insurrection and mass violence An important if often blurred distinction in the politics of revolutionary violence is that between insurrectionary and terrorist violence. In the for- mer instance, usually, an assassination (or several) is intended to provoke an uprising to overthrow what is regarded as an illegitimate regime. An act of violence, in other words, is intended to trigger a revolution, like a coup d’etat´ by one or a few individuals against an established government, on the basis of a constitutionally or morally justified right of resistance (for a British instance, see Baxter 1795). By contrast terrorist violence is usually part of a prolonged campaign which often functions as a substitute for popular uprising. In this section we will examine insurrectionary ideas, and in the next, ‘terrorism’. We will not consider secret organisations in this period whose function was not centrally but only marginally political (though such distinctions are often contentious), such as the Ku Klux Klan, 223

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek or more obviously criminal associations like the Mafia, or political organi- sations which employed violence in defence of the status quo, such as the Orangemen, founded in 1794 to suppress Catholicism in Ireland, or the ‘Royalist Terrorism’ during the French Revolution, or the ‘White Terror’ which followed the Restoration. There were also a variety of underground nationalist movements in this period worth mentioning, but which can- not be detailed, notably in Turkey; amongst the Slavs; in Greece, where the Hetairia, probably founded around 1815, helped secure independence by mustering some 20,000 insurgents in 1821–2; and in Spain, where the Communeros emerged from Freemasonry to promote moderate constitu- tionalism. Young Europe, a loose grouping of political refugees who met at Berne in April 1834 with the aim of founding ‘an association of men believing in a future of liberty, equality, and fraternity, for all mankind’ (Frost 1876, ii,p.236) was a federative revolutionary democratic organisation. Its branches included Young Poland; Young Germany, which was mostly com- posed of German workmen resident in Switzerland, and was supposed to have about 25,000 members in 1845, with branches in twenty-six towns, but was crushed after 1849 (see Weitling 1844); and Young Switzerland. It suffered a schism in 1837, when many of the communist members, chiefly followers of Wilhelm Weitling, departed. But in 1848 it committed itself, at a meeting in Berlin, to the principle of abolishing private property in land and the means of production, credit and transportation. In Poland the Templars, founded in 1822, aimed to restore national independence. Insurrections and revolutionary agitation aiming at land reform as well as national independence were common throughout this period, notably in 1830 against Russia, in 1846 against Austria, in 1848 against Prussia, and in 1863 again against Russia (Edwards 1865; Walicki 1989). A ‘Young Hun- gary’ group suffused with French political principles emerged in 1846,with a Society for Equality emerging to lead the left-wing and republican club movement in 1848. Hungary thereafter instigated a powerful nationalist resistance movement against Austria led by Louis Kossuth (1802–94)which succeeded in emancipating the Jews and peasants, and sweeping away most of the vestiges of feudalism in the name of liberal constitutionalism (Deak 1979; Deme 1976).

France From the early years of the Revolution the notion that the ancien regime´ had been felled by a vast conspiracy of enlightened ‘Illuminati’ of deist 224

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism or freethinking, cosmopolitan and republican philosophes dedicated to ‘the threefold aim of the wise – truth, freedom, and virtue’ (Frost 1876, i,p.26), had been a popular one among the Revolution’s opponents (notably Barruel 1798). That such a society, led by Adam Weishaupt, existed, and included Freemasons who opposed both despotism and priestcraft, is undisputed. (See generally Frost 1876; Heckethorn 1875; Lepper 1932;Vivian1927.) But while little credence can be attached today to such claims respecting its role in the Revolution itself, genuine conspiracies against the Direc- tory, Napoleon and the Restoration are well documented. These included groups driven underground by the prohibition on public political activity, like the United Patriots; the Society for the New Reform of France; the Society of the Friends of the People, which was active in the insurrection of 1830; and its successor, the Union of the Rights of Man, which staged an uprising in 1834, from which emerged the Society of the Families. A secret society known as the Friends of Truth was founded about 1818–20 as a political Masonic lodge. Some of its members became the nucleus of French Carbonarism, or Charbonnerie (charcoal-burners, so-called for the disguise they assumed as political refugees), which was anti-clerical and hos- tile to the emigr´ es´ , and whose main aim was the overthrow of the Bourbons (Johnston 1904). Its leading light was Armand Bazard, later a prominent Saint-Simonist. For nineteenth-century revolutionaries the prototype of this form of con- spiratorial insurrection, as well as of the type of professional revolutionary, selflessly and wholeheartedly devoted to the incandescent renewal of social virtue through violence, was Franc¸ois-Noel¨ or ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf’s abortive plot of 1796. Immortalised in the Babouvist and later Carbonarist leader Philippe-Michel Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’sConspiracy (1828), this aimed to overthrow the Directory, to return to the more democratic constitution of 1793, and to establish collective property in land within one generation by abolishing inheritance and establishing a community of goods via an equal division of the land (to about fourteen acres per family). Communal authorities were to supervise elected officials within each trade, and to reg- ulate the system of production and distribution. Private employment and commerce were to be abolished, with the national government rectifying inequalities between regions (Bax 1911,pp.125–34; Lehning 1956;Rose 1978; Thomson 1947). Babeuf (1760–97), whose first aim was to kill the five members of the Directorate, famously claimed at his trial that ‘All means are legitimate against tyrants.’ Buonarroti, the friend of Robespierre, agreed that ‘No means are criminal which are employed to obtain a sacred end’ 225

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(Laqueur 1977,p.23). (Critics accused them of going ‘all lengths in blood, in order to go all lengths in levelling’, Southey 1856, iv,p.180.) Babeuf’s scheme is sometimes described as aiming at a dictatorship as such, thus, after Robespierre, establishing the prototype of a permanent revolutionary dictatorship. Some have added that ‘the absence of anything specifically popular was precisely what made it into a terrorism’ (Laqueur 1977,p.23). More detailed studies, however, emphasise the merely provisional character of the dictatorship, which was to last no longer than three months, and to be replaced by mass democracy and popular accountability, including participation by women. Thus it has been construed as not only dissimilar to the later schemes of Blanqui and Lenin, but in fact a democratic reac- tion against Jacobinical dictatorship, even ‘one of the major breakthroughs in democratic theory that occurred during the revolutionary epoch in Europe’ (Birchall 1997,p.155;Rose1978,pp.218, 342). Nonetheless such a dic- tatorship of hommes sages ‘qui sont embrases´ de l’amour de l’egalit´ e´ et ont le courage de se devouer´ pour en assurer l’etablissement’´ (Lehning 1956, pp. 115–16), could also be construed as existing en permanence,anidea Buonarroti would advocate throughout his life (Lehning 1956,p.114). Opponents of such ideas view him as personifying the idea of ‘totalitarian democracy’, where the search for a perfect social order and the implemen- tation of one true political scheme justifies practically any means (Talmon 1960,pp.1–3, 167–248). Doubtless Babeuf and Buonarroti created the model of the secret revo- lutionary organisation, rather than a proletarian party of the later Marxist type. Here the conspiracy was centralised at the top, but composed of many small groups, usually unknown to each other. This model was utilised by the Society of the Families, founded in July 1834, which was formed on a basic unit of only six members, called a family, five or six of these forming a section, and two or three sections a quarter, the chief of whom received orders from a committee of direction. Similarly its successor, formed in 1836, the Society of the Seasons, consisted of cohorts based on gradations of a Week (the lowest), with seven members composing a Month (of four weeks), three Months making a Season (88 members), and four Seasons a Year, with a triumvirate of leaders at the top. Its aim was not merely the overthrow of the monarchy; equally to be ‘exterminated’ were ‘the rich, who constitute an aristocracy as devouring as the first’, the hereditary nobility abolished in 1830 (Hodde 1864,p.255) (but Hodde was a police spy whose veracity has been challenged).

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This movement, which had some 900 members by 1839, consisted of Armand Barbes,` Martin Bernard, and Babeuf’s most famous successor, Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), leader of the movement known as Blanquism, and often proclaimed as the founder of the theory of post-revolutionary proletarian dictatorship associated with Marx and later Bolshevism (Post- gate 1926,p.35). (But Spitzer 1957,p.176, denies that Blanqui ever used the phrase, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and views his conception of dictatorship as closer to Jacobinism than Marxism. For details of Marx’s most Blanquist phase see Marx and Engels 1978a, pp. 277–87. The issue is analysed in Lattek 2006,ch.3.) Blanqui commenced his career as an anti-Bourbon Carbonarist, but achieved fame by transmitting the tactics of revolutionary republicanism to socialism, which before 1840 was often apolitical and explicitly anti-revolutionary. The Blanquists emerged as a stu- dent society in the Second Empire, became a political faction during the Commune, languished in British exile, then regrouped in opposition to Gambetta’s middle-class republicanism in the 1880s (Hutton 1981; Spitzer 1957). Their conception of revolution was essentially Jacobin, and united fervently patriotic nationalist, anti-clerical, democratic and republican aspi- rations. Some have emphasised that this was based on a rudimentary theory of class struggle in which the ‘workers’ rather than merely the poor or the ‘people’, would play a key role. Others, however, have contended that the masses were to be led by a disinterested elite group of conspirators consti- tuted out of alienated elements in modern urban society, hence chiefly those Parisians who were the ‘people’ of Jacobin myth, rather than the industrial proletariat (Spitzer 1957,pp.162–6). After the revolution priests, aristocrats and other enemies were to be expelled from the country, the army replaced by a national militia, and the magistracy by universal trial by jury. Private property would be retained initially, but Blanqui hoped that, after universal education, it would be supplanted by communism. The Blanquists staged one abortive insurrection in May 1839, were active in 1848, and briefly mounted another uprising in 1870.

Italy In Italy, Spain, Piedmont and France, the early nineteenth century wit- nessed the rapid development of the professional underground revolution- ary organisation known as the Carbonari. They are first recorded at Naples in 1807 (see Mariel 1971, and for France, Spitzer 1971). Dedicated to

227

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek overthrowing Napoleonic rule, then, in France, to opposing the Bourbon restoration, the Carbonari helped to develop the idea of the morally pure revolutionary type, bound together by secret oaths (some swearing, blind- folded, dagger in hand, to wash in the blood of kings), with initiation rites and elaborate rituals akin to those of Freemasonry and the Illuminati, in this case without opposing Christianity (Bertoldi 1821,p.22; Hobsbawm 1959,pp.150–74). The doctrines, ritual and organisation of the Carbonari assumed many forms, but the society was generally divided into two grades, Apprentices and Masters. The assassination of traitors in their own ranks, but not necessarily their enemies elsewhere, was obligatory. Members were bound to support the principles of liberty, equality and progress, and to overthrow the rulers of Italy. They also policed their own internal morals, frowning on gambling, dissoluteness, marital infidelity and drunkenness, any of which could bring about a trial before a jury of the ‘Good Cousins’, and possible expulsion. The Carbonari helped to engineer revolutions in 1820–1, when 20,000 men invaded Naples, and in 1831 when linkages were established with conspirators in Germany and elsewhere; this sustained the revolutionary idea through some of its darkest days. Their aims were broadly republican, but this included a liberal or constitutional monarchy, which might in turn be more centralised, Saint-Simonian or more federalist (Spitzer 1971,p.275). In their most theoretical exposition, the proposed Ausonian Republic, Italy was to be divided into twenty-one provinces, each with a local assembly, the whole to be ruled by two kings elected for twenty-one years (Heckethorn 1875, ii,pp.107–8). Most of the leading Italian revolutionaries of the period were linked to this movement, which was extended to France around 1820. The most impor- tant nationalist insurgent of the early period, (1805–72), began his insurrectionary life as a Carbonaro, was linked to Buonarroti in the years 1830–3, and founded Young Italy in 1831. Under the twin principles of ‘Progress and Duty’, this aimed to overthrow Austrian rule in Venice and Milan, unite Italy under a republic, and create a revolutionary cohort capable of bringing this about (see Hales 1956; Lehning 1956;Lovett 1982). Mazzini succeeded in establishing a short-lived republic at Rome in 1848 (Orsini was one of its deputies), was active in British exile, notably on the Central Committee of European Democracy (with Ledru-Rollin and Ruge), and remained a vocal symbol of European nationalism for some two decades thereafter. He thus established Italy as what Greece had been to the generation of Byron. Thereafter he was supplanted by his leading disciple, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), whose victorious campaign in 1860 228

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Germany In Germany anti-Napoleonic resistance also gave rise to a variety of secret organisations, such as the Union of Virtue (Tugendbund), established in 1812 at the behest of the Prussian prime minister, Stein, and later linked to the Burschenschaften, or university student organisations. Here the Carbonari were also active, and established the Totenbund, or Band of Death, which was revealed in 1849 as aiming to rid the world of tyrants. A ‘League of Exiles’ was formed by Germans in 1834, but split and formed the League of the Just in 1836, which was inspired by Etienne´ Cabet and Wilhelm Weitling, and included amongst its members a number of revolutionar- ies prominent during the 1848 Revolution, notably Auguste Willich and Karl Schapper (Lattek 2006). Composed of cells of five to ten persons, its members used mystic signs and passwords, and each had a secret mil- itary name. The Communist League, which lasted from June 1847 until 1852, aimed chiefly to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and introduce a class- less society in which private property had been abolished. It abjured the traditional rituals, secret oaths and small cell basis of the secret societies in favour of an openly democratic and centralised organisation, a scheme that would remain largely unchanged through the Bolshevik period. Its goals are described elsewhere in this volume. Before 1848 the chief theoretician of these groups was the German tailor Wilhelm Weitling (1808–71), who argued for a Christian communist vision of recapturing a lost stage of natural equality by the abolition of private property and implementation of direct democracy (see Wittke 1950).

Russia Hints of revolutionary sentiment appear in Russia as early as 1790,with the publication of Radishchev’s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which has been hailed as ‘the first programme of Russian political democ- racy’ (Yarmolinsky 1957,p.13; Venturi 1960). After 1815 a number of Masonic and literary societies were founded. The earliest underground political organisation was the Society of the True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland, or Union of Salvation, founded in 1816, which briefly con- templated regicide. Another secret society, the Union of Welfare, followed 229

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek in 1818, which aimed at spreading enlightenment and the ‘true rules of morality’, and was bound by quasi-Masonic oaths and rituals (Von Rosen 1872). By 1820 various Polish revolutionary societies had been formed. An early republican thinker of note, associated with the group known as the Decembrists, was Colonel Pavel Pestel. He wedded ideas of representative government based on universal suffrage to a proto- or quasi-totalitarian state which was to rely on a powerful clergy and secret police. Serfdom was to be abolished, half the land nationalised, public morals regulated and pri- vate associations, as well as drinking and card-playing, banned (Yarmolinsky 1957,p.27). Pestel’s plottings were soon linked to the Society of United Sclavonians, or Slavs, founded in 1820, with members in many noble fam- ilies, which from philanthropic origins came to aim at compelling the Tsar to accept a liberal constitution, and mustered 3,000 troops for a short- lived rebellion in 1822. The Decembrists attempted a further coup in 1825; thereafter most were exiled to Siberia. From this point onwards, despite a variety of populist and Jacobin cur- rents of thought, radicalism and socialism were virtually inseparable in Rus- sia (Gombin 1978,p.44). In the 1830sand1840s these trends were often linked to Alexander Herzen (1812–70), who was attracted by Hegel’s ana- lytic framework as well as the writings of communalist ideas of Fourier, Proudhon’s anti-authoritarianism and Saint-Simon’s renovated Christian- ity. Like many anarchists, Herzen’s ultimate aim was the reinforcement of ‘natural’ voluntary associations, notably the mir (for peasants) and the artel (for artisans), in which external authority imposed upon the individual could be limited. Republicanism, in his view, could only mean ‘freedom of conscience, local autonomy, federalism, the inviolability of the individ- ual’ (Gombin 1978,p.53). While united by a desire to abolish serfdom, Russian radicalism was divided into Slavophile and Westernist factions, the latter including Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky. The revolutions of 1848 promoted socialist ideas, but resulted in the exile of a number of promi- nent dissidents, including Michael Bakunin, and Herzen, who continued to promote revolutionary sentiment through his journal Kolokol (The Bell, begun in 1857). This attracted a new generation of agitators, such as Nikolai Cherny- shevskii, who promoted a form of socialism based on loosely federated vol- untary associations. The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 failed to reduce the servitude of the peasantry to the landlords, and these radicals dismissed liberal proposals for a laisser-faire economy and constitutional monarchy, turning instead to republican and revolutionary principles. Such views were 230

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism startlingly expressed in the pamphlet, Young Russia (1862), which was later described as ‘the first Bolshevik document’ in Russian history. It called for a federal republic, distribution of the land among peasant communes, the emancipation of women, marriage and the family, the socialisation of fac- tories under elected managers and the closure of monasteries (Yarmolinsky 1957,p.113). One of its consequences was the popularisation of the move- ment mis-named Nihilism, which was in fact a critical realist, or naturalist and pragmatist critique of existing Russian conditions, especially as linked to Dmitry Pisarev, whose ideas were popularised as ‘Nihilist’ in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). Thereafter the term was widely adopted to connote a rejection of bourgeois opinions of marriage, religion and respectability, thus symbolising an intellectual fashion more than a political movement. Though often ranked amongst the Nihilists or Terrorists, the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–76) was in fact a professional revolu- tionary first and foremost, the epitome, in histories of anarchism, of the ‘destructive urge’, or belief in revolutionary action as a cathartic ‘purify- ing and regenerative force’ (Woodcock 1970,pp.134, 162). For Bakunin rebellion would signal the apocalypse of the institutions of the old world, with the entire state, including the army, courts, civil service and police, destroyed, and all archives and official documents burned. Yet it would simultaneously embody a creative will, born of an instinctive ‘sentiment of rebellion, this satanic pride, which spurns subjection to any master whatsoever’ (Maximoff 1964,p.380). While provoked by a secret elite organisation, it would produce a ‘collective dictatorship . . . free of any self- interest, vainglory and ambition, for it is anonymous and unseen, and does not reward any of the members that compose the group’ (Bakunin 1973, p. 193). Revolution would thus occur when the right psychological cir- cumstances, rather than, as for Marx, the economic, combined (Bakunin, 1990). Bakunin’s Principles of Revolution (1869) spelled out the variety of forms – ‘poison, the knife, the rope, etc.’ – which could be utilised to meet the end of human liberation (see Pyziur 1968). Bakunin acknowledged that many would die in any popular uprising, and counselled the death penalty for all who interfered ‘with the activity of the revolutionary communes’ (quoted in Pyziur 1968,pp.108–9). Yet he also stressed that if rebellion was by nature ‘spontaneous, chaotic, and ruthless’, and always presupposed ‘a vast destruction of property’ (quoted in Maximoff 1964,p.380), the aim of revolutionary violence was to ‘attack things and relationships, destroy prop- erty and the state. Then there is no need to destroy men’ (Bakunin 1971, p. 151). When victory was certain some measure of humanity could be 231

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Britain In Britain the 1790s and first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a variety of attempts at armed uprising (see Dinwiddy 1992a; Royle 2000; Thomis and Holt 1977). During the 1790s various organisations emerged as shadow revolutionary groups acting under the cover of legitimate parlia- mentary reform organisations, notably the London Corresponding Society, and seeking the same end of ‘equal political representation’ and parliamen- tary reform. But this could mask both republicanism and any number of possible social reforms, which were now more openly discussed than had been the case during the debate over the principles of Paine’s Rights of Man in the early 1790s (see Wells 1986). An early group was the United Britons, based in London, who were succeeded by the United Englishmen, founded in April 1797, who adopted a system of branches, called Baronial, 232

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County and Provincial Committees, principally centred in the Midlands, with members bound by a secret oath. North of the border the United Scotsmen fulfilled a similar role from 1797, taking over the earlier Society of the Friends of the People. The naval mutinies of 1797 had a political dimension, even if goals were rarely stated. Growing out of the United Britons and other organisations was the plot known as the Despard Con- spiracy (1803), which involved a plan to assassinate the King and leading members of the government (Conner 2000;Jay2004; Wells 1986,p.221). The United Irishmen, who played a prominent role in the rebellion of 1798, were the most important association of this type (see Curtin 1994; Madden 1858). Founded in Belfast in October 1791, this was not initially a revolutionary group, but aimed at ‘an impartial and adequate represen- tation of the Irish nation in parliament’. As we have seen, one of their leaders, Wolfe Tone, abjured any interest in abstract principles, and claimed that he sought not a republic, but the independence of the Irish nation; by 1796, however, Tone was committed to seeking French assistance for establishing a republic. Contemporary accounts suggest that despite many internal disagreements other members also were moving gradually towards both revolutionism and republicanism in the mid-1790s (e.g. O’Connor et al. 1798,p.3). Some United Irishmen, like Robert Emmet’s father, also derived inspiration from the classical republics (O’Donoghue 1902,p.21). By 1795 the United Irish had formed a pyramid-type organisation with many small local societies based on groups of twelve persons living in the same neighbourhood. Five local societies constituted a lower baronial com- mittee, and delegates from ten such committees formed an upper baronial committee. Above these were county and provincial committees, with a national executive at the apex. It was rumoured to have had a Commit- tee of Assassination, though this was also vehemently denied. (By Arthur O’Connor et al. 1798,p.8, for example, who asserted that the doctrine was ‘frequently and fervently reprobated’. But doubt has also been placed on such assertions; see Lecky 1913, iv,pp.80–1.) Citing the parallel of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when English revolutionaries had called upon a foreign republic to help release them from despotism, the United Irish negotiated with the French Directory through Lord Edward Fitzger- ald, and a general plan of insurrection was hatched by early 1798. This resulted in the landing at Bantry Bay of French troops in 1798,whowere, however, speedily routed. A further attempt at uprising, led by Robert Emmett in 1803, met with an equally dismal result (O’Donoghue 1902, pp. 121–77). 233

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In the post-war period another plot, which wedded millenarianism and radical politics grew out of the land reform movement associated with Thomas Spence (see Chase 1988; McCalman 1988; Poole 2000). This involved a faction in the London Corresponding Society, led by Thomas Evans, who had been associated with the United Englishmen and United Britons, which aimed at land nationalisation and the parish management of agriculture, and which eventually became the Society of Spencean Philan- thropists. It concocted the so-called Cato Street Conspiracy (1820)ledby Arthur Thistlewood, which sought to provoke a general uprising in London by assassinating the Cabinet at a dinner (D. Johnson 1974). A lesser-known Spencean uprising was led by the eccentric John Nichols Tom, aka Count Moses Rothschild, aka Sir William Courtenay. In 1838, prophet-like, Tom proclaimed that he had descended from heaven, and promised to ‘annihi- late for ever the tithes, taxation upon all the shopkeepers and productive classes, also upon knowledge’, primogeniture, placemen and slavery (A Canterbury Tale 1888,p.3). He led to disaster a small band, brandishing poles on which was impaled a loaf of bread, and seeking to distribute food, and eventually land, to the poor (Courtney 1834;Rogers1962). Generally disorganised, local, and economic in nature, was the machine- breaking campaign led by the so-called Luddites, who were particularly active between 1811 and 1816, and also formed secret organisations with illegal oath-taking (see Thomis 1972). Fuelled by poverty, but invoking a Scottish republican tradition which stretched back to 1792 and beyond, as well as recent developments in Spain, a short-lived uprising took place in Scotland in 1820 (Ellis and A’Ghobhainn 1970). Agricultural riots, often aimed at lowering bread prices, were not uncommon (Peacock 1965). The movement associated with ‘Captain Swing’, which aimed at the destruc- tion of agricultural equipment and maintenance of rural wages in 1830,was similarly neither political in nature nor revolutionary in aim, though repub- licans were reputed to be amongst its ranks, and the French Revolution of that year clearly encouraged it (Hobsbawm and Rude´ 1973). After the 1830s trade unionism also developed a much more militant strat- egy in the form of proposals for a general strike, first formulated by William Benbow (Prothero 1974). The more revolutionary aspects of Spencean agrarianism were taken up by a number of Chartists, notably George Julian Harney. The Chartists also hatched a variety of schemes for violent insur- rection, including a plan for burning Newcastle (Devyr 1882,pp.184–211), a plot to seize Dumbarton Castle and, most famously, the Newport Upris- ing of 1839, when an attempt to rescue Henry Vincent from jail brought 234

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism thousands of Chartists to converge on the small Welsh town of Newport, only to suffer rapid defeat (The Chartist Riots at Newport 1889; Jones 1985). Chartism in 1848 also became markedly more internationalist with the for- mation in the mid-1840s of the Fraternal Democrats and the Democratic Friends of All Nations, organisations that linked the Chartists to various European radicals (Lattek 1988,pp.259–82). At the end of this period a Marxist revolutionary movement also emerged (Kendall 1969,pp.3–83).

4 From tyrannicide to terrorism The politics of assassination and individual violence Historians have been unable to agree on any meaningful definition of ‘terrorism’, one person’s ‘terrorist’, notoriously, being another’s freedom fighter, with the use (or threat thereof) of systematic violence, usually mur- der and destruction, outside of formally declared wars, to achieve revo- lutionary ends being the common denominator.6 But twentieth-century terrorism is usually recognised to be of a very different character from that of the preceding century in terms of both its methods and aims (gen- eral accounts include: Ford 1985;Hyams1974;Parry1976;Paul1951 and Wilkinson 1974). Most nineteenth-century movements which involved or promoted acts of individual violence were adjuncts to or supportive of wider insurrectionary or revolutionary movements aimed at overthrowing despots like the Russian tsar, or usurpers like Louis Napoleon. Their anti-imperial component, central in the twentieth century, was much less important until the end of this period, with the notable exceptions of Ireland and India. (Latin and South American revolutionary movements rarely employed such tactics.) We cannot here consider state-sanctioned assassination of political opponents, which has always been common, as has been torture, which can also be considered as ‘terrorist’. Not examined here, either, is state terror- ism, sometimes termed ‘enforcement’ or ‘repressive’ terrorism, as opposed to ‘agitational’ or ‘revolutionary’ terrorism, such as that first initiated by Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety as the ‘Reign of Terror’ (1793– 4), where some 17,000–40,000 people were directly executed, among them

6 On some definitional problems see Wardlaw 1982,pp.3–18. Wardlaw calls ‘political terrorism’ ‘the use, or threat of use, of violence by an individual or group, whether acting for or in opposition to established authority, when such action is designed to create extreme anxiety and/or fear-inducing effects in a target group larger than the immediate victims with the purpose of coercing that group into acceding to the political demands of the perpetrators’ (p. 16). 235

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1,158 nobles, though thousands more died of disease and neglect. This introduced the vocabulary of ‘terrorism’ into political language (first evi- dently positively by the Jacobins, then as a term of abuse, by c.1795), which was then extended to other regimes, like Francia’s in Paraguay (see Robert- son and Robertson 1839). Nor can we treat the ‘normal’ functioning of autocracies in which thousands may lose their lives by political repres- sion, as in tsarist Russia, where women could be beaten to death with the knout for ‘sedition’, or the ‘normal’ mistreatment of native popula- tions. The notion that imperial rule was as such proto-totalitarian because it institutionalised brutality on a massive scale, kept large populations in terrorem as a substitute for quartering much larger bodies of troops upon them, and enforced draconian penalties for minor but ‘seditious’ criticisms of such rule, cannot be examined here. (But the ‘Negro Code’ of the late seventeenth-century French, with its routine beatings, mutilations and tor- ture of virtually the entire subject population, and the astonishingly cruel Belgian policy towards the Congolese in King Leopold’s late nineteenth- century slave state – see Morel 1906 – were clearly ‘terrorism’ personified, and belong in any account of the pre-history of twentieth-century total- itarianism.) We need also to distinguish between political assassination as a means of regime change, which has been extremely common, even the norm, throughout history (from Commodus to Constantine the Great, twenty-seven out of thirty-six Roman emperors were assassinated), and the justification of the overthrow of tyrants in the name of the common good, or tyrannicide. Nineteenth-century terrorists often took as their point of departure much older historical justifications for the assassination of tyrants by private indi- viduals in the name of the common good. This doctrine has a lengthy pedigree which stretches back to the ancient world (see Laqueur 1979, pp. 10–46). In classical Greece, Xenophon composed a dialogue on tyranny which honoured the slayer of despots. At Rome, Cicero and Seneca, among others, lauded the killing of usurpers. An extreme anti-Roman party of Zealots engaged in individual murder and destruction as part of the Jew- ish resistance. Caesar was the most famous victim of justifiable tyrannicide in antiquity, Henry IV, killed by Ravaillac in 1610, of the early modern epoch. During the Middle Ages the doctrine continued that tyrants lack- ing a legitimate title might be killed, though legitimate rulers who became despots were a much more difficult case (Jaszi and Lewis 1957). The Renais- sance and early modern period expressed such doctrines in works such as George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos (c.1568–9), the Vindiciae contra 236

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Tyrannos (c.1574–6) and Mariana’s De Rege et Regis Institutione (1599). These insisted that if the contract between king and people upon which legitimate rule rested were violated the king could be removed. Amongst many mid- seventeenth-century British works were John Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (written 1649), and Killing No Murder (1657). The French Revolution witnessed the slaying of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday – the first modern instance, perhaps, of the use of individual ‘terrorism’ against state terror, and the renewed justification by Babeuf’s supporters that ‘Those who usurp sovereignty ought to be put to death by free men . . . The people shall take no rest until after the destruction of the tyrannical government’ (Jaszi and Lewis 1957,p.128). This was the point, thus, at which older doctrines of regicide gave way before more modern ideals of individual terror, though there would still be many attempts on European sovereigns (notably that by the Corsican Fieschi on Louis Philippe in 1835)priorto the revolutions of 1848. In Germany philosophical justifications of terrorism have been claimed to have originated as early as 1842, when Edgar Bauer extended the method of Hegelian criticism to propose the revolutionary overthrow of the existing social and political system.7 Romantic justifications for assassination cer- tainly occur as early as Karl Ludwig Sand’s killing of August von Kotzebue at Jena in 1819, ostensibly for being a Russian spy. The use of terror as an instrument of insurrection was considered by the League of the Just, which later became the Communist League, and was involved in Blanqui’s 1838 uprising in Paris. It formally examined the proposition that individual terror might be a useful tactic in the form of Wilhelm Weitling’s suggestion that 20,000 thieves and murderers could form a useful revolutionary vanguard, only to reject the idea. Such threats palled, however, besides the theses of another German rev- olutionary. It was Karl Heinzen (1809–80) who provided what has been termed the first ‘full-fledged doctrine of modern terrorism’ (Laqueur 1977, p. 26). This took the form of a defence, in a tract entitled Der Mord (Mur- der), originally published in 1849, not merely of tyrannicide as ‘the chief means of historical progress’ (Wittke 1945,p.73), but of the murder of hundreds and even thousands, at any time or place, in the higher interests of humanity. If ‘the destruction of the life of another’ was always ‘unjust and

7 Luft 2006,pp.136–65; though this account does not distinguish adequately between revolutionary violence and ‘terrorism’, nor sufficiently clarify whether Bauer proposed violence against possessors of state and religious power, or a much wider body of ‘innocents’. 237

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238

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Every moment of oppression is a state of war; every forcible denial of right is a casus belli. War, then, prevails wherever a despot reigns or a people is enslaved; hostilities can be commenced at any moment, whenever the people has the strength of fortitude and the hope of success; neither truce nor treaty is broken. Revolution is the ambuscade of the people. (Adams 1858,p.6)

Young Italy was also accused of assassinations, notably of Count Rossi, but later vindicated of the charge (Frost 1876, ii,p.180). Mazzini, who had been accused of plotting to kill the Austrian emperor in 1825, and of another assassination in 1833 (Mazzini 1864, i,p.224), now reconsidered the ‘theory of the dagger’ in an open letter to Orsini (a member of Young Italy). But he rejected the idea.

Systematic terrorism Systematic or strategic terrorism as such is a product of the second half of the nineteenth century. While there were relatively small groups active in many countries, including the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, the Molly Maguires in the US labour movement, Poles, Indians, Spaniards and Armenians, the principal groups of this period were in Russia and Ireland.

Russia Russian terrorism was intimately interwoven with anarchist doctrine, but this does not as such explain its character. Much terrorist activity in this

239

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In the late 1880s Narodnaya Volya and social democratic thought began to merge, and the advocacy of terrorism became linked increasingly with organising the working class for socialist ends (Venturi 1960,pp.700–2). Some Narodniki in this period, such as Abram Bakh, now dismissed terror as ineffectual, counterproductive and incompatible with true revolutionary principles (Naimark 1983,p.230). But such views did not predominate. A second wave of Russian terrorism followed the founding of the Social Revolutionary Party, commencing with the assassination of the Minister of the Interior, Sipyagin, in 1902, rising to fifty-four attentats in 1905,eighty- two in 1906 and seventy-one in 1907, then declining. This group offered an elaborate justification of terrorism which was melded with Marxist theory, the aim of terrorist acts being not the glorification of the individual act of will, but revolutionising the masses (Geifman 1993,p.46). The many attempts to kill a succession of tsars thus fit the classic practice of tyran- nicide, which was then extended to other members of the regime, with 240

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism terrorism eventually permeating the entire anarchist and socialist left in Russia. The first person to advocate conspiratorial violence as a means of arousing and educating the masses rather than as a means of seizing power was Sergei Nechayev (1848–82), widely regarded as the practical ‘founder’ of modern terrorism (see Rapoport and Alexander 1989,p.70). He is often quoted for his assertion that ‘The Revolutionary knows only one science– destruction...Dayandnighthemayhaveonlyonethought, one purpose: merciless destruction’ (Jaszi and Lewis 1957,p.136); ‘For him exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction, the reward of revolution’ (Zenker 1898,p.137). To Nechayev everything could beregarded‘asmoralwhichhelpsthetriumphofrevolution...Allsoftand enervating feelings of relationship, friendship, love, gratitude, even honor, must be stifled in him by a cold passion for the revolutionary cause’ (quoted in Carr 1961,p.395). The character of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is based upon him. The idea that ‘The urge of destruction is at the same time a creative urge’ was as we have seen thereafter developed practically by the principal anarchist leader of this period, Michael Bakunin, who shared a sense of historical inevitability with Marx. Its philosophical expression was further expanded by Georges Sorel (1847–1922), whose Reflections on Violence was published in 1912, and was indebted to the philosopher Henri Bergson (see Arendt 1969). By the 1890s, too, there emerged what we would today term the psychological profiling of the terrorist ‘type’ as a special brand of deviant criminal or ‘anti-authoritarian’ personality, in which a lust for power, sexual impropriety and anti-Semitism could be wedded into a seemingly scientific political psychology (see Kreml 1977; Lombroso 1896). This was countered by the glorification of the Robin Hood robber type, such as the Rus- sian Stenka Razin, as a form of what Eric Hobsbawm has described as a ‘primitive rebel’ or ‘social bandit’, where the boundaries between criminal, or brigand, as Nechayev would have it, and revolutionary, are more than uncommonly blurred (Hobsbawm 1959, 1972). It was also met with the plea of the reasonableness of violent reaction to circumstances of extreme oppression and official violence or state terror (Goldman 1969b, pp. 79– 108). At the end of the century some revolutionaries, such as Plekhanov, sought to restrict the use of terror to special circumstances. Others, such as Morozov, favoured ‘pure terror’ as a strategy superior to both individ- ual assassination and spontaneous uprising, because it ‘punishes only those who are really responsible for the evil deed’ (Laqueur 1979,p.74), though Morozov still aimed at a socialist end-point. By 1879 the latter view came to 241

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Fenianism The most important Western European insurrectionary movement throughout the nineteenth century was that linked to Irish nationalism. While there had been many groups operating in Ireland beforehand, such as the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen (Clark and Donnelly 1983; Whelan 1996; Williams 1973), the movement known as Fenianism built upon efforts of the YoungIreland party (Davis 1987; Duffy 1896). (Modern studies of the move- ment include Comerford 1998;Davis1974; Garvin 1987; Newsinger 1994; Quinlivan and Rose 1982; Walker 1969.) Young Ireland emerged in 1842 around the journal, the Nation. It included John Mitchel, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis and William Smith O’Brien, and left-leaning radicals like Fintan Lalor (see Lalor 1918)in1848, and their later followers, notably Michael Doheny. Socially some of these men were fairly conservative and backward looking, romantically viewing a lost past of peasant-proprietors as a goal to be recaptured; Mitchel also opposed the French ‘Red Repub- licans’ in 1848. Later generations of nationalists were more sympathetic to seeking some compromise between capitalism and socialism, while James Connolly, though somewhat isolated, plumped for socialism tout court (Con- nolly 1917). Like the Poles, many Irish republicans also remained Catholic, by contrast to the anti-clericism of many French and Italian revolutionaries. What united them, it has been claimed, was the fact that the movement was ‘avowedly republican and separatist from the very first’ (Henry 1920,p.33). Following the failure of O’Connell’s Repeal Association in the mid- 1840s, and the suppression of a brief insurrection in 1848, Fenianism com- menced in the United States and Ireland in the late 1850s. It was led by two Young Ireland members exiled in Paris, James Stephens, who returned to Ireland, and John O’Mahony, who went to the US. Under the name of ‘Fenian’, adopted from Fianna Errinn by O’Mahony (Pigott 1883,p.99), invoking a legendary pre-Christian warrior order, and first used around 1859, it was thereafter often associated interchangeably with the ‘Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood’ and then the ‘Irish Republican Brotherhood’ (IRB), which lasted until 1924. (A ‘Constitution of the Fenian Brother- hood’ is dated 1865.SeeThe Fenian’s Progress: A Vision, 1865,pp.68–91.) The Fenian organisation began recruitment in 1858, held its first national meeting in 1863, and became linked with another American organisation, 242

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism the Clan-na-Gael, founded in 1869, by which time it had over 200,000 members. It existed separately in Ireland from 1858, under the name of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The Fenians were organised around a ‘centre’ or ‘A’, who was supported by nine ‘Bs’, or captains, each of whom had nine ‘Cs’ or sergeants, each leading a group of nine privates, every level knowing only those immediately closest to it. This scheme Stephens probably copied from the Blanquists and other French conspirators, though it has been alleged (in a suspect source) that Stephens’ plans differed from those of continental plotters in that he sought the long-term arming of a substantial portion of the population in order to defeat the British army, rather than a brief insurrection (Rutherford 1877, i,pp.61–2). Members were sworn to secrecy, obedience to superiors and loyalty to the goal of making Ireland a democratic republic. Associated in the first instance with an abortive attempt to invade Canada in May 1866, and an equally fruitless uprising in Ireland in 1867, the Fenians began in the early 1870s to plot a lengthy campaign of violence, but were for a time overshadowed by both the Land League and Parnell’s Home Rule movement, to whom they deferred tactically (Henry 1920,p.34; Samuels, n.d.). A plan to seize Dublin and defend it by barricades was hatched early in the struggle (Bussy 1910,p.26). In 1873 the Fenians adopted a resolution not to attempt another armed insurrection until support from the majority of the Irish people was evident. By 1876 O’Donovan Rossa, disgusted at Fenian inactivity, mounted his own plan of violently resisting England by raising a ‘Skirmishing Fund’ to strike it at ‘any vulnerable point’ (The Times-Parnell Commission Speech 1890,p.56). He was quoted as saying ‘I go in for dynamite. Tear down English cities; kill the English people. To kill and massacre and pillage is justifiable in the eyes of God and man’ (Adams 1903, ii,p.565). From this time onwards the ‘dynamite propaganda’ or ‘propaganda of terrorism’ (Davitt’s phrase: The Times-Parnell Commission Speech 1890,p.100) was to be more closely associated with Rossa than anyone else. (Davitt himself rejected the ‘dynamite theory’ as ‘the very abnegation of mind, the surrender of reason to rage, of judgment to blind, unthinking recklessness’, The Times-Parnell Commission Speech 1890,p.408; see F. Sheehy-Skeffington 1908,p.141.) From 1878 the Fenians supported Home Rule and the policy of obstruc- tion in Parliament, as well as the Land War, which commenced in 1879, led by Parnell’s National Land League. This coalition lasted until 1882, when Parnell broke from the Fenians and established the Irish National League. The Fenians’ most notorious success in this period was the 243

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek assassination of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under-Secretary, Thomas Burke, at Phoenix Park in 1882,bya secret society led by P. J. Tynan and known as the ‘Invincibles’. Most of these were Dublin members of the Fenian Brotherhood or Land League organisers. They thereafter disappeared, and this ended Parnell’s flirtation with the movement (Davitt 1904,p.363). (It has been claimed, however, that this act was the result of Land League activity, and went against official Fenian policy at the time. See O’Brion 1973,p.122,andHistory of the Irish Invincibles 1883.) In turn, however, the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ by which Par- nell was released in exchange for new laws promoting tenants’ rights, gave an even greater fillip to the ‘dynamite’ propaganda aiming to make ‘land- lordism...impossibleinIreland’(Davitt1904,p.427). Plots were mounted to assassinate Queen Victoria, to blow up the House of Commons and to sink British shipping using a submarine (which was actually built in New Jersey). It was consequently claimed that the Fenians ‘preached and put into operation the same ferocious doctrines’ as the anarchists. ‘It is the duty of every Irish citizen’, cried an Irish orator in 1883, ‘to kill the representa- tives of England wherever found. The holiest incense to Heaven would be the smoke of burning London’ (Adams 1903, ii,pp.563–4). But agents provocateurs also infiltrated these schemes, and it was frequently denied that such tactics ‘ever had the approval of the Fenian organisation in Amer- ica or elsewhere’ (Sullivan 1905,p.170). An ‘Assassination Committee’ was supposedly established to deal with traitors within the movement, but only one man, an agent provocateur and informer, Chief Constable Tal- bot, met a violent end, and the very existence of such a committee was denied by leaders like Davitt (Moody 1981,p.511). Between 1882 and 1885 some dozen explosions occurred in Glasgow, Birmingham and Dublin, but chiefly in London, where Underground stations were a favoured target. An especially powerful bomb caused great damage in the House of Com- mons on 24 January 1885. And the strategy seemed to work; leading Fenians quoted with approval the Westminster Review’s conclusion that ‘Dynamite has brought Home Rule within the scope of Practical Politics’ (Denieffe 1906, p. 289). Sinn Fein´ (‘Ourselves Alone’ – meaning self-reliance) was founded by Arthur Griffith after 1899 with the aim of promoting passive resistance to British rule, a policy soon adopted by the IRB and Clan-na-Gael. Linked to the Gaelic League (founded in 1893), which did much to support cultural separatism, it also promoted Irish cultural nationalism, linguistic and cul- tural de-Anglicisation, and economic self-sufficiency (Henry 1920,p.64; 244

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O’Hegarty 1919,pp.14–15). Emerging as a definite political grouping in 1905, Sinn Fein´ became a ‘strictly constitutionalist’ rather than a republican movement (Henry 1920,p.51), seeking the restitution of the constitution of 1782. Under Griffith it advocated (in imitation of Deak)ˆ a ‘Hungar- ian policy’ of abstention from parliamentary activity as a substitute for armed conflict, which was renamed the ‘Sinn Fein´ policy’ (Griffith 1918; O’Hegarty 1919,p.18). Soon moribund, Sinn Fein´ was revived when its predecessor and Fenian remnant, the IRB, linked it to physical force meth- ods and strengthened republican sentiment (Brady 1925,p.9; Henry 1920, p. 88; O’Hegarty 1924,p.17). Thereafter it would play a central role in the Easter Uprising of 1916, assisted by James Connolly’s Irish Socialist Repub- lican Party (founded 1896). The physical force separatist wing of Sinn Fein´ then formed the nucleus of what became known as the Irish Republican Army, or IRA. It has been claimed, however, that prior to 1916 the idea of physical force occupied in separatist philosophy only ‘a subordinate place. It was a line of action, but it was not the only nor the main line of action; it was, rather, a last reserve . . . The use of arms, and the right to insurrect, were maintained as a matter of principle, but rather as a means of arousing the nation’s soul than as a policy’ (O’Hegarty 1924,pp.164–5).

Continental and extra-European developments Amongst the other European terrorist writers active in this period, mention should be made of Johann Most (1846–1906), who early in 1879 established the Freiheit in London, with the motto: ‘All measures are legitimate against tyrants.’ A German Social Democrat, Most was jailed in London for praising the assassination of Alexander II, but succeeded in transferring his paper, Freiheit, to the USA, where it became the most influential anarchist journal of the day. Most rejected the parliamentary road to socialism, contending that conspiracies led by an elite cadre aiming at the murder of the exploiters (including policemen and spies) would arouse the latent resentment of the masses. One of the most important developments in the anarchist tradition on the continent following the Commune emerged with the theory of ‘propaganda by deed’. The phrase had been coined in 1877 by a French physician, Paul Brousse (1844–1912) (Stafford 1971; Vizetelly 1911), and was linked from the late 1870s with an Italian peasant tax rebellion led by Errico Malatesta (see Richards 1965), Carlo Cafiero and the Russian Peter Kropotkin, among others, for whom its great aim was to spread ‘courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice’ (Kropotkin 1970,p.38). The idea came to be seen as a substitute 245

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek for intellectual propaganda as such. Here, too, we see the target of violence widening from a regime and its officials to a class, and not a small hereditary order, either, but potentially all property owners or bourgeois.Everyact of violence against the established order, in this view, came to be seen as progressive; for some, such as the French shoemaker Leon-Jules´ Leautheir,´ any bourgeois was a fit (i.e. morally guilty) target; when the anarchist Auguste Vaillant was executed he shouted ‘Death to middle-class society, and long live Anarchism!’ (Vizetelly 1911,p.153). Class could now potentially justify blood-letting on a scale as wide as race, a point Pol Pot would so vengefully exemplify in the later twentieth century. This acceptance of a mass category of ‘legitimate’ targets was an extremely important step in the transformation of tyrannicide into modern terrorism (Fleming 1982,pp.8–28). In an anti-imperial context, this could be widened to include all members of the occupying ethnic group or nation. Amongst the most important anti-imperial struggles to develop a ‘terrorist’ compo- nent in this period was India. There had been isolated cases of assassination in India as far back as 1853, when Colonel Mackison, the Commissioner at Peshawur, was stabbed by a ‘fanatic’ from Swat who intended to prevent British invasion of his ancestral lands (Hodson 1859,p.139). In June 1897 two British officers were murdered by members of a Hindu military society, commencing a new campaign of violence (MacMann 1935,p.43; Steevens 1899,pp.269–78). By the end of this period political assassination became increasingly common. Mainstream nationalists were much influenced by Mazzini, and Bengali extremists received aid from Irish-American Fenians (Argov 1967,p.3; Bakshi 1988). In 1908 a book was published entitled The Indian War of Independence, 1857, wrapped in a dust jacket inscribed ‘Ran- dom Papers of the Pickwick Club’, which justified the killing of women and children. Bomb-parasts, or worshippers, now became more common. On 30 April 1908, a young Bengalee, Khudiram Bose, killed a Mr and Miss Kennedy at Muzafferpur with a bomb intended for the magistrate, Mr Kingsford. The nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who cited the authority of Krishna in the Bhagavadg¯ıta¯ respecting the legitimacy of assassi- nation, was arrested for extolling the use of bombs as ‘a kind of witchcraft, a charm, an amulet’, and convicted of sedition (Chirol 1910,p.55). (Indige- nous religious traditions were beginning to be interwoven with violent protest; see Macdonald 1910,p.189.) This battle was also taken to the streets of London in 1909, when Lord Morley’s political secretary, Sir W. Curzon Wyllie, and Dr Lalcaca were murdered. A host of other acts occurred in India shortly thereafter, and recruitment efforts overseas were renewed. 246

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Some political violence also occurred in Egypt, including the assassination of the Prime Minister in 1910. Here nationalism and anti-British feelings, inflamed by events like the 1864 Dinshiway incident, where four villagers were executed after the accidental death of a British officer, were linked to an Islamic justification for the killing of tyrants and ‘infidels’ alike (Badrawi 2000). In the late nineteenth century political violence escalated dramatically throughout the world. The ‘golden age’ of political assassination began in 1870s with the killing of the liberal Spanish Prime Minister Juan Prim, by right-wing opponents. By the time of the International Anarchist Congress held in London in 1881 the justification of acts of individual violence had gained wide currency, and the fusion of the image of a card-carrying anarchist and bomb-wielding dynamitard accomplished. This image, which remains to this day, was especially associated with dynamite, which had been invented in 1866 and had become the fashionable weapon of choice. A multitude of attempts on leading European politicians followed; vic- tims of the ere` des attentats at its peak included the president of Ecuador, Gabriel Moreno (1875); the Japanese prime minister in 1878;theliberal French president Sadi Carnot (1894), killed by an anarchist for whom he was a symbol of political power, rather than individually guilty; the Shah of Persia, Nasr-ed-Din (1896), killed by a Shi’ite mystic; the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas (1897), another anarchist victim; the Empress Elizabeth of Austria (1898); and the increasingly absolutist King Umberto of Italy (1900), shot by an anarchist. The American president McKinley followed in 1901, again at anarchist hands, with the King of Serbia falling in 1903, the prime ministers of both Greece and Bulgaria in 1907, the King of Portugal in 1908, the Egyptian prime minister in 1910, the Domini- can prime minister in 1911, another Spanish prime minister in 1912,the president of Mexico in 1913, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914. This list could easily be doubled (see Hyams 1969). Individual acts of violence also increasingly characterised labour disputes in France and Spain. In the United States, Alexander Berkman, with the justification, ‘The more radical the treatment ...thequickerthecure’(Berkman1912, p. 7), attempted to assassinate the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Com- pany in 1892 following a bitter strike. But there were also those, like Emile´ Henry, able to justify the random bombing of a cafe,´ with no particular vic- tims in mind, because society had collectively condoned injustice (Mered- ith 1903,pp.189–90). Violent tactics also entered the Suffragette move- ment in 1912–14, though only destruction of property (window-breaking, 247

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek postbox-burning) was generally sanctioned (stones thrown through win- dows were wrapped in paper to minimise injury). But violence as such was not glorified, and ideological inspiration seems to have been practically non-existent (Harrison 1982; Pankhurst n.d.; Raeburn 1973). The classic age of modern political assassination, whose motives thus included religion and opposition to liberalism and democratic reform as well as radicalism, ended in 1914. There were, however, important exceptions to this trend. Many Amer- ican anarchists, such as Benjamin Tucker, contended that violence could only be legitimately justified by reformers ‘when they have succeeded in hopelessly repressing all peaceful methods of agitation’ (Eltzbacher 1908, p. 211). A number of other prominent anarchists, notably Tolstoy and Gandhi, and including individualists like Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner (see Rocker 1949,p.161), also rejected violence entirely. By the 1890s Kropotkin in particular had come to deplore the loss of innocent life, denying that revolutions were made by heroic acts, while refusing to condemn their perpetrators. But other anarchists, notably the geographer Elisee´ Reclus (1830–1905), less hesitatingly insisted that the ends justified the means, and that every act of violence against the existing order was good and just (Fleming, 1979). (But it has been claimed that Reclus had ‘nothing in common with the folly of the dynamitard’; Zenker 1898,p.161.) The case can certainly be made that the blood-lust increasingly encouraged by political violence – but equally imperial conquest – in this period heralded and prepared the way for the vastly greater blood-baths of the twentieth century, as both fascism and communism accepted, justified and promoted violence as a means of first obtaining and then maintaining state power, thus wedding the philosophy of individual terror to attain power to that of state terror to maintain it.

Terrorism and its justification: theory and problems It is worth briefly considering what light these developments cast on the- ories of terrorism, particularly in so far as the dissection of key moral issues facilitates the framing of a usable definition of the term itself. The relationship of the classical doctrine of tyrannicide to modern ‘terrorism’ is complex, and beset by definitional ambiguities. The propensity to condemn any armed struggle as ‘terrorist’ in which war has not been declared formally undermines any more precise definitions, and hinders further clarification of the subject. But according to classical definitions neither assassination 248

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism as such nor the effort to overthrow by force a despotic regime, or a force of foreign occupiers in one’s own country (or another’s) would necessarily qualify as ‘terrorist’. Nonetheless the subject is fraught with paradox, contradiction and moral ambiguity. Much late nineteenth-century Russian political violence was aimed at the tsar, for example, who was widely recognised as an autocrat, ‘the real upholder of despotism’, as Victor Hugo put it, rather than a mere ‘mask’ like Louis Bonaparte (Hugo 1854,p.4). Such resistance could be and was often construed by liberals as both ‘legitimate’ and justifiable; even John Stuart Mill would exclaim of the attempt on Napoleon III’s life in 1858 that ‘What a pity the bombs of Orsini missed their mark, and left the crime-stained usurper alive!’ (quoted in Morley 1917, i,p.55). Similarly when Count V. Plehve, the Russian minister of the interior, was killed in 1904, many liberals applauded the act (Seth 1966,p.216). But the reign of Louis Napoleon, sometimes described as the ‘first modern dictator, basing his authority directly upon a carefully controlled expression of the people’s will’ (Packe 1957,p.253), rested of course on a plebiscite. To his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, who famously shouted ‘sic semper tyrannis’ as he fired his pistol, the emancipator of American slaves, Abraham Lincoln, was also a ‘tyrant’. (Southern landowners had published an offer of $100,000 to kill him two years earlier.) But the Duke of Wellington refused to admit that he possessed any right to have Napoleon Bonaparte assassinated (Browne 1888,p.135). Nor are ‘wars of liberation’ aiming to free nations or peoples definable as nations ‘terrorist’ as such; such struggles lie more properly within the literature of the tradition known as the ‘just war’ (Dugard 1989, pp. 77–98). It has been pointed out, too, that most guerrillas adhere to the chief canons of war in confining their targets to the armed forces and adjuncts thereof of their enemies. The chief theoretical issues which arose from the emergence of the tactic of individual violence as part of nineteenth-century revolutionary strategies, which would be adapted and modified in the twentieth century, include: (1) The question of the scope of permitted or legitimate assassination vis-a-` vis ‘tyrants’: here the problem of ‘innocence’, when ‘killing’ is not ‘murder’, requires a coherent definition of tyranny or despotism. If a tsar (or a Hitler or Stalin) might be legitimately killed (but both also enjoyed widespread popular support), what justifications permit this? And when? We should recall that temporary elective dictatorships, notably in wartime, have been permitted in most societies; hence ‘dictators’ cannot constitute a legitimate category for tyrannicide as such, though genocidal murder by a dictator 249

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek probably would trigger such a distinction. (But as we have seen, many European nations engaged in genocidal policies during this period. The assassination of Queen Victoria by a black Tasmanian would certainly have been legitimate according to this logic.) Additional questions include: Does ‘terrorism’ include the killing of ‘innocent’ civilians who might be family members of government officials in a despotic regime? Does it include killing such family members in an occupied colony by natives of that land?8 Does the necessity of defending a revolution justify expanding the scope of the legitimate use of violence, such that, as Bronterre O’Brien contended, ‘a large proportion of the victims’ of French revolutionary terror ‘deserved their fate; for they would have murdered every democrat in France, had they not been destroyed, themselves’ (O’Brien 1859,p.9). (2) The political context in which terrorism is utilised where ‘tyranny’ is absent: Can ‘terrorism’ ever be justified against a democratically elected government? ‘Tyranny of the majority’ can assume many different and very oppressive forms (ethnic, religious). Such distinctions were drawn at this time. When President Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by an oppo- nent of liberal treatment of the defeated South, the Executive Commit- tee of the Narodnaya Volya condemned the act, arguing that because the will of the people made law in the United States, the use of such force was not justifiable (Jaszi and Lewis 1957,p.138). But the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 was inspired by anarchists (Vizetelly 1911, p. 251).

8 It is worth noting that what a ‘despot’ was also underwent change in this period; as G. J. Holyoake stated, ‘Formerly a man was regarded as a lawful ruler who reigned by what he called “divine right”. Since representative government began, a king is regarded as a despot unless he reigns by Parliamentary right. A ruler may be good or bad, but he is still a despot if he rules by his own authority, or prevents any one else ruling by public appointment.’ Thus ‘tyrant killing, undertaken for public ends, with a view to temper or suppress despotism, is not regarded by moralists as murder. It is apparently a necessity of progress there and at that stage only, and is only defensible when done under such circumstances that armed resistance cannot be reasonably attempted. Where the justification of irremediable oppression does not exist, tyrant-killing is a mistake.’ But he also added that ‘Nevertheless the good despot who rules justly cannot be usefully killed, since one cannot be sure that an untried government, introduced by force; could rule better than he.’ He then drew up four principles by which tyrannicide could be justifiable (none of which he regarded as applicable in a free country): ‘1. That the tyrannicide must have intelligence sufficient to understand the responsibility of setting himself up as the redresser of a nation . . . 2. He who proposes to take a life for the good of the people must at least be prepared to give his own if necessary – both as atonement for taking upon himself the office of public avenger and to secure that his example shall not generate other than equally disinterested imitators . . . 3. The adversary of the despot must not be weak, vacillating, or likely to lose his head in unforeseen circumstances, nor be deficient in the knowledge and skill needful for his purpose . . . 4. He should have good knowledge that the result intended is likely to come to pass afterwards’ (Holyoake 1893, ii,pp.59–61). 250

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(3) The issue of the nature of the method adopted: here the key question is the justification of violence where there is a significant risk of ‘innocents’ being injured; over 150 were injured, for instance, in Orsini’s 1858 bombing. Many attempts involved several methods at once; the successful plot against Alexander II of 1 March 1881 proposed to assail the Tsar with explosives, grenades and finally daggers. Here, as elsewhere, the key question is whether the end to be achieved, if it can itself be justified, justifies the means adopted. (4) The justification of suicide bombing: Holyoake said of Orsini that ‘Those who engage in political assassination should have no hesitation in sacrificing themselves’ (Holyoake 1893, ii,p.27). (5) The problem of the relation of terrorism to insurrection and internation- alism. This raises the question of the scope of those legitimately permitted to exercise such violence; in particular, sympathisers with a struggle as opposed to the actual victims of an oppressive regime. The willingness to fight in the cause of others, from the French in Ireland to Byron in Greece onwards, also stemmed from a sense of internationalist loyalty and devotion to prin- ciple which transcended local and national boundaries, divided loyalties and produced a sense of fragmented and contradictory political identity. Many Irish fought on both sides of the American Civil War. Escaped convicts assisted Australian Aborigines in their resistance to white violence. Some Europeans evidently took the side of mutinous sepoys in India in 1857–8 (Forbes-Mitchell 1893,pp.278–85). Two Irish brigades as well as an Irish- American corps (plus Italians, Scandinavians, Russians, Germans, Greeks, Austrians, Bulgarians, French and Dutch volunteers) fought alongside Boers in the South African war (Conan-Doyle 1900,p.82;Davitt1902,pp.300– 36). (Irish taken prisoner were protected from treason charges by having previously been granted citizenship by the Volksraad.) It was easy for an Irish nationalist like Michael Davitt to condemn England’s ‘cowardly and unchristian’ warfare in South Africa from the Boer point of view (Davitt 1902,pp.579–90). To those who regard all forms of imperialism as prima facie illegitimate, such cosmopolitanism was often applauded rather than condemned (see Claeys 2010). (6) The issue of the glorification of violence for its own sake, for exam- ple as ‘creative’, or for some psychological end which benefits the perpe- trator. We need here to consider what, if any, links really exist between the destructive and the creative, and whether that ‘creative hatred’ which Sorel dismissed, against Jaures` (Sorel 1969,p.275), is not an oxymoron. A related and underlying issue is the danger of moral egoism, or of a reli- gious or quasi-theological suspension of moral norms (e.g. an anomic or 251

Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 128.103.149.52 on Tue Feb 16 15:57:51 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.009 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek antinomian state of grace). Anarchists sometimes claimed that an individ- ual could ‘be a law unto himself’ (Vizetelly 1911,p.3) in the manner of the sixteenth-century Adamites and Anabaptists. There were precedents for this stance earlier in the modern period too; a black flag carried in Wexford in 1798 by Irish rebels carried the letters ‘M.W. S.’, which some have interpreted as ‘Murder Without Sin’, signifying that it was no sin to kill a Protestant (Holt 1838, i,p.89). But this has been denied, too. The glorification of violence for its psychologically liberating effects would be taken up in the twentieth century, most notably, in the context of the Algerian wars, by the French psychiatrist Franz Fanon (Fanon 1969;Per- inbam 1982). The danger here that legitimate justifications for opposing tyranny disintegrate into open-ended and self-perpetuating blood-lust is evident.

5 Conclusion Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the secular revolu- tionary ideal identified with the ‘principles of ’89’, seemed to have run its course, only to gather momentum again this century, with new challenges to authoritarian regimes everwhere. Nonetheless the idea of revolution remains tainted by the failed promise of historical necessity, and the accu- sation of implicit totalitarianism, the fulfilment of Proudhon’s warning that those who were ‘fascinated by the schism of Robespierre’ would ‘tomorrow be the orthodox of the Revolution’ (Proudhon 1923a, p. 127). Throughout much of the world nationalist movements emerged directly from anti- colonial and anti-imperial resistance. But malformed, corrupt and failed nation states too commonly resulted, and national identities did not always succeed in transcending and mitigating ethnic, religious and tribal enmities. Even in otherwise successful and relatively mature democracies, disfran- chisement of women and exploited minorities has continued even to the present. ‘Radicalism’ is today associated chiefly with right-wing extremist movements, rather than the extension of the franchise. Though the issue now excites little public emotion, republicanism has proven more success- ful in the long term, with many leading monarchies being extinguished completely in the early- to- mid-twentieth century, and others shorn of any real political or constitutional power. By contrast, debates about ‘ter- rorism’ are as heated today as in the late nineteenth century, and have subsumed much of the controversy once associated with revolutionism. By

252

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